COMMUNISTS

LIKE Us

NEW SPACES OF LIBERTY,

NEW LINES OF ALLIANCE

FELIX GUArFARI
& ToM NEGP

WITH A
"POSTSCRIPT, 1990"
BY Toni NEGRI

qq0 (!qg)
Translated by Michael Ryan

SEMIOTEXT(E) FOREIGN AGENTS SERIES

0 Ai C
 Communists Like Us

Main text originally published in French

in 1985 as Nouvelles espaces de liberté.
This is the original publication of the
"Postscript, 1990" by Toni Negri.

Special thanks to Jared Becker,

Jim Fleming, Jeff Fort,
Michael Hardt, Sylvère Lotringer,
Michael Ryan, and Tom Yemm.

Translation copyright © 1990 Semiotext(e)

Semiotext(e)
522 Philosophy Hall
Columbia University
New York, NY 10027 USA

Printed in the United States of America

 -

The project: to rescue "communism"

from its own disrepute. Once invoked as the
liberation of work through mankind's col-
lective creation, communism has instead
stifled humanity. We who see in commu-
nism the liberation of both collective and in-
dividual possibilities must reverse that regi-
mentation of thought and desire which ter-
minates the individual.
Bankrupt: the collectivist regimes
have failed to realize socialist or communist
ideals. Capitalism too has played fast and
loose with promises of liberty, equality, prog-
ress and enlightenment. Forget capitalism and
socialism: Instead we have in place one vast
machine, extending over the planet an en-
slavement of all mankind. Every aspect of
human life - work, childhood, love, life,
thought, fantasy, art - is deprived of dig-
nity in this workhouse. Everyone feels only
the threat of social demise: unemployment,
poverty, welfare.
8 FEUx GUArrAm & TONI NEGRI
Work itself defaults on its promise of
developing the relations between humanity
and the material environment; now everyone
works furiously, to evade eviction, yet only
hastening their own expulsion from the me-
chanical process that work has become.
Indeed work itself - as organized
- has become
by capitalism or socialism
the intersection of irrational social reproduc-
tion and amplified social constraints. Fetters
- irrational social constraints - are thus at
the foundation of all subjective conscious-
ness formed in the work process. And estab-
lishing this collective subjectivity of restric-
tion and surveillance is the first imperative
of the capitalist work apparatus. Self-surveil-
lance and doubt prevent any intimations of
escape, and preempt any questioning of the
political, legal or moral legitimacy of the sys-
tem. No one can withdraw from this capital-
ist legality of blindness and absurd goals.
Each instance of work, each sequence,
is "overdetermined" by the imperatives of
capitalist reproduction; every action helps to
solidify the hierarchies of value and author-
ity.
And yet - why is it that the discus-
CoruvIuNIsTs LIKE Us 9
sion of communism is taboo? This discourse
is defamed and banished by the very people
it pretends to liberate from their chains. Could
it be due to the seductive, "progressivist" ra-
tionality of capitalism and its organization of
work?'
Afterall, capitalist work arrangements
have succeeded in appropriating the discourse
of communism - an analysis of labor and
its liberatory power - and reduced it to tech-
niques of manipulation: "Arbeit Macht Frei."
Even the socialist varieties trumpet recovery
and reconstruction as though these were in-
strumental goals attainable through technical
means. The "ethic" of social revolution has
become instead a nightmare of liberation be-
trayed, and the vision of the future is freighted
with a terrible inertia...
Not so long ago, the critique of capi-
talism was directed at its destructive, pene-
trating market. Today we submit to its trau-
matization of our souls, passively assuming
that reinvestment strategies are the least op-
pressive form of planning - and socialism
or capitalism becomes a moot point.
So now everything must be rein-
vented: the purpose of work as well as the
10 FEUx GUATFARI & To NEGRI
modalities of social life, rights as well as
freedoms. We will once again begin to de-
fine communism as the collective struggle
for the liberation of work, that is, at once, an
end to the current situation!
*****
Empty-headed economists dominate
all over the globe - and yet the planet is
devastated, perhaps inexorably. We must af-
firm first of all that there is more than one
path: the path of capitalist imperium and/or
socialist/collectivist work forms whose per-
sistence and vitality depend to a large part
on our own incapacity to redefine work as a
project and a process of liberation. We will
define communism as the assortment of so-
cial practices leading to the transformation
of consciousness and reality on every level:
political and social, historical and everyday,
conscious and unconscious. Recognizing that
discourse is action, we will forge a new dis-
course in such a fashion as to initiate the
destruction of the old way. But our commu-
nism will not for all that be a spectre haunt-
ing the old Europe ...We rather envisage an
CoIvm1uNIs'rs Lu Us 11
imaginative, creative process at once singu-
lar and collective, sweeping the world with a
great wave of refusal and of hope. Commu-
nism is nothing other than a call to life: to
break the encirclement of the capitalist and
socialist organization of work, which today
leads not only to a continuing surplus of re-
pression and exploitation, but to the extinc-
tion of the world and humanity with it.
Exploitation has advanced, on the
basis of nuclear accumulation, to become a
threat of execution; the cycles of war and the
danger of destruction are well known. Now
we are not determinists - but today it is not
only determinists who recognize thatthe end
is, if not near, certainly close by, especially
if we abandon power to the capitalist and
socialist juggernauts of labor. Preventing ca-
tastrophe will require a collective mobiliza-
tion for freedom.
Continuing...
Why does everyday life tremble with
fear and loathing? This fear is not the state
of nature as described by Hobbes - that old
excuse of the war of all against all, individ-
ual wills fragmented in a thirst for power.
Rather what we have now is a transcenden-
12 FEUx GUATTARI & TONI NEGR1
tal, yet actually manmade fear which seeps
into every mind with immobilizing, cata-
strophic dread. Indeed hope itself has fled
this hopeless, hapless, grey world. Beyond
malaise, life sinks into sadness, boredom and
monotony, with no chance to break out of
the morass of absurdity. Communication -
speech, conversation, banter, even conspir-
acy has all been taken in by the "discourse"
of mass media. Interpersonal relations like-
wise have spoiled, and are now character-
ized by indifference, disingenuous disgust and
self-hatred - in a word, we're all suffering
from bad faith.
Amazingly, the fabric of human feel-
ings has itself come unraveled, since it no
longer succeeds in connecting the threads of
desire and hope. As a result, this pseudo-war
has passed over the world for 30 years with-
out its key features being noticed; the Cold
War escapes unrecognized as the true cul-
prit.
During that whole time, human con-
sciousness has been ground down into some-
thing more manageable, even complicit. As
the individual sinks into isolated despair, all
the built up values in the world collapse
COMMUNISTS LIKE Us 13
around him. Fear breeds impotence and pa-
ralysis of every sort. Only this collective stu-
pefaction prevents onrushing despair from
reaching its logical conclusion in collective
suicide; apparently there's not enough pas-
sion left for such a crisp transformation. But
the real tragedy is that exploitation masquer-
ades as fear: individual extensions - of de-
sires and hoped- for the future - have been
simply prohibited, but under a metaphysical,
rather than political guise.
And yet. And yet all the developments
in the sciences and in the productive capaci-
ties of labor point to the existence of an al-
ternative. Extermination or communism is the
choice - but this communism must be more
than just the sharing of wealth (who wants
all this shit?) - it must inaugurate a whole
new way of working together.
Real communism consists in creating
the conditions for human renewal: activities
in which people can develop themselves as
they produce, organizations in which the in-
dividual is valuable rather than functional.
Accomplishing this requires a movement -
to change the character of work itself. And
redefining work as creative activity can only
14 FELIX GUATrARI & TONI NEGRI
happen as individuals emerge from stifled,
emotionally blocked rhythms of constraint.
It will take more than the will to change, in
the current situation; to resist neutralization
itself demands desire.
Paradoxical as it seems, work can be
liberated because it is essentially the one
human mode of existence which is simulta-
neously collective, rational and interdepend-
ent. It generates solidarity. Capitalism and
socialism have only succeeded in subjugat-
ing work to a social mechanism which is lo-
gocentric or paranoid, authoritarian and po-
tentially destructive. By means of progres-
sive struggles, workers in the advanced in-
dustrial countries have succeeded in lower-
ing the threshold of direct and dangerous ex-
ploitation; but this has been countered by
changes in the character of that domination.
Modem exploitation accentuates the dispar-
ity between rich and poor countries - now
it is unfree workers in underdeveloped na-
tions who bear the brunt of exploitation
through violence and the threat of hunger.
The relative improvement in the situation of
the "Metropolitan Proletariat" is balanced by
extermination in the Third and Fourth
COMMUNISTS Lwi Us 15
Worlds. As contradictions built into work
have proceeded to their limit, it is not an
accident that the liberation of work can now
be accomplished by workers in the most ad-
vanced sectors of science and technology.
What is at stake is the fundamental ability of
communities-, racial and social groups, indeed
minorities of every kind to conquer and es-
tablish autonomous modes of expression -
not just lifestyles, but the work process it-
self.
There is nothing inevitable about
work - no destiny leads work into ever
greater repressions. In fact, the potential for
liberation inherent in work itself is more vis-
ible than ever. How can Capital continue to
present its work process as natural and un-
changeable, when for technical reasons it is
changing every day? This unexamined gap
in the logic of work is the opening through
which new movements of social transforma-
tion will charge pell mell.
Traditionally, the refusal to work, as
an instance of struggle and as spontaneous
action, has aimed at those structures which
are obstacles to the real liberation of work.
From now on, that struggle involves appro-
16 FEux GUATFARI & Tor'n NEGIu
priating a new capital, that of a collective in-
telligence gained in freedom, the experience
and knowledge that comes from breaking
down the one dimensional experience of pres-
ent day capitalism. This involves all projects
of awakening and building towards libera-
tion; in short, anything that helps reclaim
mastery over work time, the essential com-
ponent of life time. All the current catch-
words of capitalist production invoke this
same strategy: the revolutionary diffusion of
information technologies among a new col-
lective subjectivity. This is the new terrain
of struggle, and it is not utopian to believe
that consciousness itself is the "swing voter"
deciding if capitalist or non-capitalist roads
are taken. Once, knowledge and power were
stockpiled like so many canon or missiles;
now the empowering of a collective con-
sciousness, part of the turmoil of the
workplace, threatens to unite small arms into
a mass revolt.
From this perspective, communism is
the establishment of a communal life style in
which individuality is recognized and truly
liberated, not merely opposed to the collec-
tive. That's the most important lesson: that
CoMMuNIsIs Lam Us 17
the construction of healthy communities be-
gins and ends with unique personalities, that
the collective potential2 is realized only when
the singular is free. This insight is funda-
mental to the liberation of work. Work as
exploitation has completed its development
of the general, the mass, the production line;
what's now possible is to tap into the poten-
tial ofindividual creative energies, previously
suppressed. Nothing less than a genetic break-
through, this rhizome* of autonomy in the
workplace can establish itself as a produc-
tive enhancement - and a serious challenge
to the dead weight of bureaucratic capitalism
with its "over-coded" and de-individualized
individual.
Make no mistake about it: commu-
nism is not a blind, reductionist collectivism
dependent on repression. It is the singular
expression for the combined productivity of
individuals and groups ("collectivities") em-
phatically not reducible to each other. If it is
not a continuous reaffirmation of singularity,
then it is nothing - and so it is not para-
doxical to define communism as the process
of singularization. Communism cannot be
reduced in any way whatsoever to an ideo-
18 FEUx GUA1TARI & TONI NEGRI
logical belief system, a simple legal contract,
or even to an abstract egalitarianism. It is
part of a continuous process which runs
throughout history, entailing a questioning
of the collective goals of work itself.
Glimpses of these new alliances are
already available. They began to form and
seek each other out at the time of the sponta-
neist and creative phase, which of course
developed parallel to the big break-up and
realignment in capitalist society to which we
have been witness over the past three dec-
ades. To better locate and appreciate their
importance, one can distinguish:
* "molar antagonisms": struggles in
the workplace over exploitation, criticisms
of the organization of work, of its form, from
the perspective of liberation;
" "molecular proliferation" of these
isolated instances of struggle into the outside
world, in which singular struggles irreversi-
bly transform the relations between individu-
als and collectivities on the one hand, mate-
rial nature and linguistic signs (meanings)
on the other.
Thus the maturing social transforma-
tions, which in turn affect productive work
CovIuIsnsTs Lna Us 19
arrangements, are induced, piecemeal, by
each and every molar antagonism: any
struggle against capitalist and/or socialist
power formations contributes to overall trans-
formation. Social, political and workplace ad-
vances condition each other. But, and this is
our point, the revolutionary transformation
occurs in the creation of a new subjective
consciousness born of the collective work
experience - this moment is primary, all
stakes are won or lost here, in the collective
creation of subjectivity by individuals. We
Sta-linist
need to save the glorious dream of commu-
nism from Jacobin' mystifications and
nightmares alike; let's give it back this
power of articulation: an alliance, between
the liberation of work and the liberation of
subjectivity.
Singularity, autonomy, and freedom
are the three banners which unite in solidar-
ity every struggle against the capitalist and!
or socialist orders. From now on, this alli-
ance invents new forms of freedom, in the
emancipation of work and in the work of
emancipation.
20 FEUx GUATrARI & ToM NEGRI
2 contradictions of the capitalist systems.
THE REVOLUTION
BEGAN IN '68
I. SOCIALIZED PRODUCTION
It is not necessary to sit reading in a
café to realize that the cycle of revolution
reopened in 1968, and indeed achieved its
high water mark of intensity. What was only
an indication in 1917, and which subsequent
wars of national liberation failed to achieve
in any lasting way, was brought to light by
the events of 1968 as the immediate possi-
bility of collective consciousness and action.
Yes, communism is possible. It is
true, more now than ever, that it haunts the
old world. 1968 revealed the fragility of the
social contracts installed successively to con-
tain the revolutionary movements of the be-
ginning of the century, those which followed
the big crisis of 1929 and the movements
which accompanied and followed the second
great imperialist war. However one views the
events of 1968, it is undeniable that they re-
vealed the failure of this social compromise
CoMIvIur4lsm Lnu Us 21
to eliminate or supersede the antagonistic
We will now examine the three se-
ries of material transformations which con-
cern the quality, the dimensions, and the form
of capitalist "producing", and by doing so,
highlight those new objective starting points
from which any effort to change society will
have to begin.
The quality of producing. The strug-
gle between the working classes and those
of the capitalist and/or socialist bosses had
resulted in a system of production that was
more concentrated and "massified." The im-
possibility of rationally overcoming crises,
which revealed the social polarization' of
power, led to the efforts at managing the
strongly centralized, planned economies, both
capitalist and socialist. In this new environ-
ment, the classical law of value no longer
operated as an expression of the relation be-
tween concrete real labor and amounts of
money needed to secure an existence. The
new version of the law instead related huge
masses of "abstract" or undifferentiated la-
bor to the ethereal information machines
which supplant industrial production. Labor
22 FELIx GUATFARI & Tom NEGRI
is "deterritorialized" - without foundation
or meaning, it neurotically succumbs to a
process which deprives working people of
knowledge even as it is essentially knowl-
edgecreating activity in the first place. Mod-
em work was creating a global, infernal dis-
ciplinary apparatus, in which the constraints
were invisible: educational and information
constraints which placed the worker at all
times under the sway of capital. No longer
an eight hour wage-slave, the worker now
produced and consumed continuously for
capital. Capital in the process became more
socialized, advancing social cooperation, in-
tegrating the collective forces of labor even
as it turned society into a giant factory, in
which the pacified consuming classes were
organized into unions.
Deterritonalized production signifies
that work and life are no longer separate;
society is collapsed into the logic and proc-
esses of capitalist development. The conse-
quences of this assimilation of society to work
are profound: All the guarantees and re-
sources of the welfare state - (wage sys-
tems, unemployment insurance, family assis-
tance, pensions etc. - were intensified, but
Co%,IrVIuMsTs Ln Us 23
now they became part of the production proc-
ess itself, rather than social defenses against
capitalist dislocations. Social welfare in fact
became a social dream: as the production
process remade society in its own image, that
high degree of abstraction was transferred to
social life. Production now conferred mem-
bership in society. As the independent vari-
able, production stamps society with its char-
acteristic, leaving no region untouched. An
equation is established, in which capitalist
advancement and exploitation are seen as es-
sential features of social machinery - that
this is the meaning of society, and of course
it has become true...
The political consequences of this
transformation are equally profound. A high
degree of political mobilization, evident in
the demand for political participation grow-
ing out of a century of revolution and class
consciousness, has expanded but then dissi-
pated into a social consciousness. All the ef-
forts of the bosses, who are conscious of this
new socialization, consist of maintaining it
- either through democratic or totalitarian
means - within the framework of institu-
tions and of rules for dividing the social prod-
24 FELIX GUATTARI & ToNI NEGRI
uct, which permit them to reproduce and thus
to reinforce their commanding positions, in
a manner that transforms economic into po-
litical power.
Before examining the consequences
of this transformation of command, it is im-
portant to recognize another essential aspect
of the changing character of production. The
emergence of socialization as a crucial com-
ponent of production has naturally affected
the production process itself. Socialization,
typically viewed as a formal quality, mutates
into a substantive one: One may observe, for
example, how the socialization of rural peas-
ants accompanies their loss of independence,
or how service sector workers lose social
cohesion as they are functionally absorbed
into rigid, mechanized production processes.
Up to this point, however, the indus-
trial modes of production associated with
capitalism and socialism had only taken pos-
session of social inequalities from the out-
side, so to speak. The great conflagration of
1968 demonstrated that the new economic
techniques now implicated the domain of
social reproduction. Before then, the world
of production was based on exchange values
COMMUNISTS Ln Us 25
(commodity production) and the reproduc-
tion of use value (utility). All that is over. In
this regard, one could consider the move-
ments of that period as necessary preliminar-
ies...
Now the remaining private sphere -
family, personal life, free time, and perhaps
even fantasy and dreams - everything from
that point on became subjected to the semiot-
ics of capital. This transformation took place
regardless of political climate: democratic,
fascist, socialist. Socialized production suc-
ceeded in imposing its law, its logic, on ev-
ery facet of social life on earth, vampiristi-
cally appropriating free time, the life blood
of humanity.
The events of 1968 posed themselves
as an antagonistic recognition of this trans-
formation of the social quality of production
and work procedures. In a chaotic but none-
theless convincing way, they revealed the
fundamental contradiction at the base of these
transformations, that of conferring an im-
mense productive capability to humanity
while at the same time imposing a new pro-
letarian destiny. This destiny originated in
permanent expropriation, in the deterritori-
26 FELIX GUAUARJ & TONI NEGRI
alization that allows no home base, no soli-
darity, no recourse, no guarantees, and ex-
tends not only throughout social life but into
the unconscious.
Generalized exploitation, at all levels
of society, had the effect of redefining pro-
duction as the source of new, "supplemen-
tal" sources of unhappiness, and correspond-
ingly new forms of political, even micro-po-
litical conflict. The new modes of produc-
tion - integrative, totalizing, subtly totali-
tarian - effectively transformed the old
modes of economic slavery into thinly dis-
guised cultural and political subjection. A
struggle ensued, which attempted to reduce
all resistance against the supposed economic
necessity to powerlessness. But it is precisely
this transfer of "totalitarist" objectives to the
minute, molecular levels of everyday exis-
tence which gives rise in turn to new forms
of resistance on these most immediate lev-
els, throwing into relief the entire problem
of individual and collective isolation.
In 1968, this new "reactivity" ex-
pressed itself in the form of a tremendous
shortcircuit. It would be useless to try to
mystify these events, as the softheads of re-
Cow.,iumsTs LIKE Us 27
covery have tried. It would be useless at this
point to stigmatize the return of the great
monsoons of irrationality. And what would
such references to rationality signify anyway,
in a world in which functionalism is strictly
geared toward Capital, which in itself con-
stitutes a maximization of irrationality? The
question which remains posed since 1968 is
rather that of knowing how to establish a
creative and liberating relation between hap-
piness and instrumental reason.
From '68 on, we have also witnessed
an inversion of the cycle of struggles against
colonialism and underdevelopment, and some
attempts at internal modernization have ap-
peared, on the part ofthe more dynamic sec-
tors of the capitalist and socialist bourgeoi-
sies. But there is a big difference between
these ideological efforts - lip service, basi-
cally - and the realities of exploitation and
new forms of concrete resistance.
1968 expresses the actual reopening
of a critical consciousness, itself the crystali-
zation of objective changes within the work
force and production generally. This recog-
nition appeared at first as rebellion, and as a
new opening itself made possible by eco-
28 FELIX GUATTARI & TONI NEGRI
nomic growth, its impasse, crisis, and the
consequent reflexes of rejection. The essen-
tial force of 1968 resides in the fact that for
the first time in the history of human revolts
against exploitation, the objective was not
simple emancipation, but a true liberation,
extending beyond the removal of obvious,
individual chains. The movements attained a
global level reflected in a heightened con-
sciousness of the historical linkage of singu-
lar struggles. For the first time at that level
of intensity, the molar macrocosms and the
molecular microcosms - the global and the
local - began to combine in the same sub-
versive whirlwind.
The events of 1968 thus mark the reo-
pening of a revolutionary cycle. Not by the
repetition of old slogans, but through the in-
tervention of new perspectives on action, and
by a redefinition of communism as enrich-
ment, diversification of community and con-
sciousness. Certainly the movement remained
inseparable from the development of previ-
ous social struggles, and the redeployment
of the employers' capacity for resistance and
attack, but an important historical qualitative
leap nevertheless occurred. At that point of
CoruNTsm LUKE Us 29
individual radical fulfillment, what was re-
quired to generalize revolution among a sig-
nificant portion of the population? Nothing
short of a social cyclotron: the generation of
an immense collective energy, the accelera-
tion of ideas and emotions. In 1968, a revo-
lution worthy of the most authentic aspira-
tions of humanity was born.
II. BEYOND POLITICS
At the time of these movements, the
refusal by living social labor of the organi-
zation of profit-based capitalism and/or so-
cialism began to spread into the political
arena. From a multiplicity of singular con-
flicts a grand opposition arose, directly con-
fronting the political power responsible for
administering social production. Traditional
politics found itself completely cut off from
this mass movement of collective conscious-
ness; it shared no ground with the transfor-
mation of subjectivity. Traditional politics
succeeded in grasping it only from the out-
side, by attempting to stall, repress, and fi-
nally to restructure and recover on its own.
But by this very misapprehension and de-
30 FELIx GuA1-rARI & TOM NEGRI
thai, it merely demonstrated its own power-
lessness.
Politics today is nothing more than
the expression of the domination of dead
structures over the entire range of living pro-
duction. A short time ago, at the end of the
great revolutionary periods, history witnessed
similar political restorations, which had no
other goal than to "cover" the fundamental
absence of legitimacy on the part of the elites
who regained power. The princes who gov-
ern us seem to have returned, in the most
absurd of ways, on the same perverse and
empty stages, in the same vicious cycles
which appeared in the aftermath of the Great
Revolution and the Napoleonic epoch. (It is
sufficient here to cite The Charterhouse of
Parma.)
And Hegel's remark comes to mind:
"This temple decidedly lacks religion, Ger-
many lacks metaphysics, Europe humanity,
reformism imagination..."
On the other hand, the collective
imagination remains alive, but it can no
longer conceive of politics outside of the
paradigms and avenues of change which be-
gan to appear in 1968.
CouNIsm Lm Us 31
This is true first of all for the tradi-
tional left. The historical communist parties,
prisoners of antiquated paradigms of produc-
tion, did not even succeed in imagining the
revolutionary force of the social mode of pro-
duction which was in the process of emerg-
ing. Incapable of separating themselves from
centralist organizational models deriving from
a paradigmatic split between the avant-garde
and the masses, they found themselves dis-
oriented and frightened in the face of the
unexpected self-organization of a social
movement.
Loyal to the one dimensional destiny
of the reformist movement, they experienced
the explosion of new demands in the
workplace, and of new desires in the socio-
cultural world, as a catastrophe which liter-
ally left them in a paranoid state. The same
applies to a lesser degree to social demo-
cratic forces.
In the "actually existing socialist"
countries, the reaction was extremely brutal,
while in the West, it was more insidious,
maneuverable, willing to compromise.
In all of these instances, one finds
the same invariants: - social conservatism,
34 FEux GUATrARI & Tom NEGRI
which can maintain as its only ideal a vision
of castles and courts completely removed
from all real life, these small aristocratic urn-
verses which are blind to the new aspirations
for freedom, new territorialities striving for
autonomy! But how else can one describe
these political aristocracies when, from their
fortresses, they attempt to impose a stratifi-
cation of society, devoid of consistency, sub-
stituting instead a general arrogance, an in-
different cruelty?
Disease, corruption, plague and mad-
ness spread within these closed universes just
as they did in the ruling houses of the ancien
régime. But their time is running out: we are
at the threshold between suffering and the
moment when history's potential will realize
itself. The paralysis of political structures and
all the current governmental "difficulties" are
both symptoms and specific traits of mori-
bund power formations; they are incapable
of adjusting to the movements of society.
There is no doubt that these problems
were initiated by the movements of the '60's.
In fact, that was the moment when the surg-
ing tide of social struggles arrived at his-
tory's center stage. Since that time, as we
C0MMuT%nsTs Liio Us 35
shall see, the attempts to regain control of
the situation have been numerous. But they
were all short-lived because the political cri-
sis was not, as the reactionary right assumed,
the result of simple economic imbalances,
having nothing to do with politics, but rather
due to the inability of institutions to trans-
form themselves. The roots of the crisis of
politics were social. The current silence of
the political forms of opposition reflect a cu-
rious neutralization: a canceling-out effected
by the mutual interference of different com-
ponents of social production, each of which
is itself thoroughly disturbed and undergo-
ing transformation. The so-called "death of
politics," of which one hears so much, is only
the expression of a new world which is
emerging and which employs new and dif-
ferent modes of material and cultural self-
valorization - either through entirely exter-
nal means or peripherally to the dominant
power formation, but which, in any event,
are antagonistic to it. It is thus a world in the
process of change which began its expansion
in '68 and which, since then, through a proc-
ess of continuous mutation, including all sorts
of failures and successes, has struggled to
36 FELIx GUATrARI & Tom NEGm
weave a new network of alliances at the heart
of the multiplicity of isolated singular com-
ponents comprising it.
This is the new politics: the need to
recharacterize the fundamental struggles in
terms of a continuous conquest of (new) are-
nas of freedom, democracy, and of creativ-
ity. And, whatever the militants and the in-
tellectuals who have "given up on all that"
may say, there is nothing anachronistic or
retrograde or anarchist in this way of con-
ceiving things; indeed, it attempts to under-
stand contemporary social transformations -
including their contradictions - on the basis
of the productive activities, the desires, and
the real needs which regulate them. What is
on the other hand entirely irrational and mad
is the power of the State, as it has evolved
since the 60s, into a sort of lunar Stalinism
which only multiplies ad nauseam its rigid-
ity and its institutional paralysis. The fero-
cious will to a "death of politics" is nowhere
more dominant than in the Glacial Palaces
of power.
Although much of it is empty and
mystified, this type of power is nonetheless
terribly effective. Moreover, one should not
COMMUNTSTS Luc.s Us 37
underestimate or overlook the great mass of
pain and anguish that lies concealed behind
its cynicism and its technocratic indifference:
the insecurity of everyday life, the precari-
ousness of employment, the fragility of civil
rights, and, perhaps most of all, the impossi-
bility of locating meaning in individual and
collective life, the de facto banning of com-
munitarian projects, of all "creative becom-
ings" from establishing themselves on their
own terms. This pain, which accompanies
the lack of humanity in the capitalist brand
of subjectivity, can be converted into an infi-
nite array of reaction formations and para-
doxical symptoms: inhibitions, evasions of
all sorts, but sabotage as well, the transfor-
mation of refusal into hatred. This to-and-fro
movement reaches its limit when the fear of
destruction articulates a consciousness of the
madness of power; then the pain itself be-
comes the vertigo of annihilation. This mon-
strous will to death in all its different forms
today constitutes the true character of poli-
tics and the true cause of human misery.
38 FELIx GUATrARI & ToNI NEGRI
III. THE NEW SUBJECTIVITIES
Since the '60s, new collective sub-
jectivities have been affirmed in the dramas
of social transformation. We have noted what
they owe to modifications in the organiza-
tion of work and to developments in sociali-
zation; we have tried to establish that the an-
tagonisms which they contain are no longer
recuperable within the traditional horizon of
the political. But it remains to be demon-
strated that the innovations of the '60s should
above all be understood within the universe
of consciousnesses, of desires, and of modes
of behavior. It is on this level that the changes
became definitively irreversible. These new
modes of consciousness have literally dislo-
cated the old scenarios of class struggle by
invading the imaginary and cognitive roots
of productive activity, transforming the con-
sciousness that corresponds to that activity
into an act of transformative individual will.
Along the way this individuation of desire
has thus spread to the realm of collective
practices, which now constitute the new po-
litical territories. The dramatic and tumultu-
CoIrvIuNIsTs Ln Us 39
ous affirmation of desire puts our social "liv-
ing" into question and makes it the basis of a
higher subjective expression of the ensemble
of material and semiotic systems of produc-
tion. Its opposition to private property is a
radical negation of all forms of blind collec-
tivism in capitalist and/or socialist undertak-
ings, and its refusal of work on command
actually expresses the will of a higher level
of social production.
All seeming connections between this
refusal and the massification of social sub-
jectivity must be broken; the relation must
be reduced to a paradox, by virtue of which
the poverty of this massification is confronted
with the most singular processes of subjec-
tive will.
Communism has nothing to do with
the collectivist barbarism that has come into
existence. Communism is the most intense
experience of subjectivity, the maximization
of the processes of singularization - indi-
viduation which represent the capability po-
tential of our collective stock. No universal-
ity of man can be extracted from the naked
abstraction of social value.
Communism no longer has anything
40 FELIx GUATFARI & Toru NEGRI
to do with any of this. It is a matter rather of
manifesting the singular as multiplicity, mo-
bility, spatio-temporal variability and crea-
tivity. That today is the only value on the
basis of which one can reconstruct work. A
work which no longer is crystallized in the
form of private property, which does not con-
sider the instruments of production as ends
in themselves, but as means for attaining the
happiness of singularity and its expansion in
machinic rhizomes - abstract and/or con-
crete. A work which refuses hierarchical com-
mand and which in doing so poses the prob-
lem of power, clarifies the functions of de-
ception and exploitation in society, and re-
fuses all compromise, all mediation between
its own existence and productivity. (All of
which implies redefining the concept of work
as the transformations and arrangements of
production within the frame of immediate
liberation efforts.) New modalities of collec-
tive subjectivity themselves bring together
these qualities and these desires which change
relative to productivity. The new production
of subjectivity conceives of power from this
point on solely as an horizon of the collec-
tive liberation of singularities and as work
Covu1uNIsTs Lix Us 41
oriented toward that end - in other words,
as self-valorization and self-production of
singularities.
The social struggles which exploded
in '68 and in the years following conferred a
tremendous power on the coming-to-aware-
ness of students and young people, the
women's movement, the environmental and
nature first movements, the demand for cul-
tural, racial and sexual pluralism, and also
the attempts to renovate the traditional con-
ceptions of social struggle, beginning with
that of workers. All too often these experi-
ences have been described in terms of mar-
ginality. Marginality was quickly drawn to-
ward the center, and the minoritarian de-
mands succeeded - with difficulty - in de-
taching themselves from those of the lifeless
middle ground. And yet each of them, by
following its own course and by articulating
its own discourse, potentially represents the
needs of the large majority.
Potentially, but in a way that is not
any the less efficacious: By taking hold of
society as a whole, productive socialization
wanted to confer on individuals, communi-
ties, and their reciprocal relations the char-
32 FELIX GUATrARI & ToM NEGR1
combined with a systematic corporatist ef-
fort to channel and co-opt struggles; - po-
litical reaction, combining a recourse to State
power with an appeal to traditional structures,
in an attempt to reestablish the legitimacy of
the old "elites"; - the squandering of col-
lective subjectivity, in particular through in-
tense use of the mass media, governmental
agencies, and the Welfare State as a whole.
In fact, the left parties have been dev-
astated by the effects of the movement of
'68 and, even more so, by the collective-
singular movements which have emerged
since then as the bearers of social transfor-
mation. The left has attached itself even more
to the traditional statist structures; and in
doing so it has jettisoned its own relation-
ship of conflict and compromise, and thus its
own basis of legitimacy. But these structures
were irrevocably altered by the counter-at-
tacks of '68; from then on, the old politics
could no longer hide its cadaverous face. The
constitutional and institutional structures of
developed countries east and west find them-
selves to be doubly undermined: from the
inside, by their severe inability to adapt; and
from outside, by the new forms of labor pro-
COMvIuNISTh Ln Us 33
test, reflected in the increase of marginal and
part-time "non-guaranteed" workers,' as well
as other numerous minorities who reject the
status quo. This impasse has precluded any
possibility of renewal.
All "progressive" capitalist perspec-
tives, which would have involved increased
popular participation, were systematically
blocked. Constitutional structures, whether
they be capitalist or socialist, democratic or
totalitarian, have certainly experienced
change, but typically in negative terms, al-
ways cut off from social movements whose
effects they endure, and always by mystify-
ing the actual operation of the system of po-
litical representation.
Attempting to respond to this decline
in the institutions of popular political repre-
sentation, power has resorted to techniques
of anticipation and substitution, opting for
symbolic simulation, adaptation and control.
At the moment when the whole of society
was finally absorbed into production, and the
entirety of working and everyday life was
exposed as fundamentally political, that po-
litical character was repressed, denied and
manipulated. What a gothic sort of society
42 FELIX GUATFAm & ToM NEGRI
acter of universality. But the universality with
which they were decked out didn't suit them
in the least! Instead of a well-fitting hat, it is
a mask, a cowl which only disfigures the
expression of their needs, their interests, and
their desires. It is not a paradox to say that
only the marginalities are capable of univer-
sality, or, if you prefer, of movements which
create universality. "Universal" politics are
not capable of any transcendent truth; they
are not independent of the games of eco-
nomic valorization; they are inseparable from
specific territories of power and of human
desire. Political universality cannot therefore
be developed through a dialectic of ally/en-
emy as the reactionary Jacobin tradition com-
petitively prescribes. Truth "with a universal
meaning" is constituted by the discovery of
the friend in its singularity, of the other in its
irreducible heterogeneity, of the interdepend-
ent community in the respect for its appro-
priate values and ends. This is the "method"
and the "logic" of the marginalities which
are thus the exemplary sign of a political
innovation corresponding to the revolution-
ary transformations called forth by the cur-
rent productive arrangements.
CouNism Lin Us 43
Eveiy marginality, by placing its
stakes on itself, is therefore the potential
bearer of the needs and desires of the large
majority. Before '68, the problem of repro-
duction remained marginal in relation to pro-
duction. The women's movement has made
it central. Although the questions relating to
the preparation of the abstract and non-mate-
rial labor force remained lateral in relation
to the factory labor force, the student move-
ments made them central in the same way as
the new needs which the theoretical and aes-
thetic imagination proposed. The emerging
collective consciousness came thereby to see
itself as the nodal articulation of a multitude
of marginalities and singularities; it began to
confirm its power on the scale of a signifi-
cant social experience, which did not close
back on itself or "conclude," but which
opened out onto further struggles, the prolif-
eration of processes of collective singulari-
zation and the infinitely differentiated phy-
lum of their ongoing transformation.
This imagination of liberation thus
undertook, with more or less success, to su-
perimpose - and to impose itself - on the
fiction of the dominant realities. Its lines of
44 FED( GUATrARI & TOM NEGRI
collective feeling, its "new softness," its ca-
pacity to bring together the most immediate
preocèupations with the broadest social di-
mensions demonstrated that the emerging
forms of production were not the enemy of
desire, liberation, and creativity, but only of
the capitalist and/or socialist organization of
work for profit. Human goals and the values
of desire must from this point on orient and
characterize production. Not the reverse.
During this period, the production of libera-
tion became the foremost goal. It will proba-
bly take some time before one can grasp the
full significance of what was then at stake.
To repeat, it had nothing at all to do with
utopianism, but with the intrinsic reality of
that historical period's social movement. It
was probably the women's movement, with
its extraordinary power of development,
which, after '68, most advanced the new syn-
thesis of the concept of production and of
social liberation. For the first time, with that
degree of lucidity, production for profit and
work for the reproduction of the species were
overturned, revolutionized on the basis of the
most extreme singularity, that of the total
"conception" of the child and of generating
CommumsTs LIKE Us 45
a new softness to life.
But this incredible experience was
also a symbol: the revolution was understood
as an optimization of singularities, as the
beginning of a mobilization against the dis-
aster of the current situation and its forms of
command. The corporeality of liberation be-
came primary: Insurrection of bodies as an
expression of subjectivity, as incarnating the
materiality of desires and of needs, as prom-
ising in the future the impossibility of sepa-
rating the collective character of economic
development from the singularity of its ends.
Insurrection of bodies, meaning the success-
ful liberation of those immense productive
forces which humanity, up to this point, only
turned against itself. 1968 represents the sub-
jective side of production; this is an "inter-
pretation," on a large scale, of its social tex-
ture, which displaces the previous political
problematics onto the terrain of representa-
tion considered as a singular project of lib-
eration.
1968 is also a magnificent reaffirma-
tion of democracy. The fact that it was
crossed by a certain naive "Rousseauism,"
that through it a few last champions of Jacob-
46 FELIX GUATrARI & TONI NEGRI
inism and of a disfigured Leninism came to
shine forth for a few moments, doesn't in
any way detract from the power of democ-
racy in the movement considered in itself. It
showed that the proletariat, from this point
on, socialized and singularized, would not
be able to "comprehend" a political move-
ment except on the condition that it is
founded on democratic arrangements in ac-
lion. This was not only a theoretical truth
but also a concrete historical affirmation:
there is no specific form of freedom which is
not attached to the group goals of the move-
ment and lived, "experienced," by its mem-
bers. This new "given" was underscored in a
certain way, ontologically, in the generation
which came after '68. And which wants to-
day to send us back to the school of Anglo-
American liberalism and its ideas of the mar-
ketplace! Anti-capitalism and anti-socialism
have become the only forms which permit a
renaissance of democracy.
I CommumsTs LIKE Us 47
3
THE REACTION OF THE '70S:
"NO FUTURE"
I. INTEGRATED WORLD CAPITALISM
A restructuring of power helped to
restore the command mechanisms in the 70s,
and to restart the process of capitalist and
socialist productive accumulation. Politics
and economics, capital and the State, were
now completely integrated. The process de-
veloped in two directions.
In the first place, as the international
integration of national economies on an in-
creasingly world scale, and their subordina-
tion within a polycentric and rigorously
planned project of control. We call this fig-
ure of command which coordinates yet exas-
perates the unity of the world market, sub-
mitting it to instruments of productive plan-
ning, monetary control, political influence,
with quasi-statist characteristics, Integrated
World Capitalism (I.W.C.). In this process,
World Capital integrates, besides the devel-
48 FEUD,, GUATrARI & TONI NEGRI
oped countries and directly dependent on
them, the ensemble of real socialist coun-
tries, and controls, in addition, the means by
which the economies of numerous Third
World countries are absorbed, putting in ques-
tion their previous position of "peripheral
dependence." Indeed, statist command and
the national States thus undergo a veritable
deterritorialization. Integrated World Capi-
talism is not limited to recomposing, using
new forms of unification, the flux and hier-
archies of statist powers in their traditional
sense. It generates supplementary statist func-
tions which are expressed through a network
of international organizations, a planetary
strategy of the mass-media, rigorous taking
control of the market, of technologies, etc.
It is certainly important to avoid an
ingenuous or anthropomorphic conception of
I.W.C. which would entail describing it as
the work of a Leviathan or as a one-dimen-
sional macro-structure of the Marcusean va-
riety. Its planetary expansion, as well as its
molecular infiltration, occur through mecha-
nisms which can be exiremely flexible and
which can even take contractual forms. Each
one engages legal forms that rely on con-
CoMIVItJNTSTS Li Us 49
tinuous procedures rather than constraining
substantive law. But it is no less true that it
is this very procedural and regulatory con-
tinuum of relations which consolidates the
centripetal tendency of the system, by dilut-
ing and "negotiating" the effect of crises in
time and space and by relativistically reterri-
tonalizing each singular process.
In the second place, and conditioning
the constitution of this global integration, the
restructuring aims at the mode of production
and the ensemble making up the collective
labor force which relates to it. This deterrito-
nalization and this integration was facilitated
by rendering the social into data form, i.e.
on the basis of the fundamental computeri-
zation [informatisation] of society. Exploita-
tion could thus be articulated scientifically
over the entire arena of the social, extending
the control of profit creation mechanisms.
Under these conditions, the assembly line of
commercial and industrial production spreads
its fabric over the social, not in its symbolic
sense but materially. Society is no longer
merely subsumed by capitalist command; it
is absorbed entirely by the integrated mode
in
of production. Differences productivity and
50 FELIx GUATrARI & TONI NEGRI
in levels of exploitation can then be articu-
lated in a smoother, more diffuse way within
each geo-political segment according to re-
gion, country, or continent. Competition, the
key link in the bourgeois market, is no longer
very important for this process of capitalist
retraining.
The transnational computerization of
the social is concerned with only one form
of competition: that which it can provoke
between workers and between the different
strata of the working class and of the prole-
tariat. It thus becomes possible for Integrated
World Capitalism to activate specific tech-
niques of analysis and control of social
classes - 'which now make struggles erupt,
now pulverize their power at those points
where their level of politicization is signifi-
cant, or, on the contrary, unleash them in a
controlled way at those points where the prob-
lems of economic "take-off" and of political
reform are posed most urgently.
As it has always been in the history
of capital, this renovation of the forms of
command by Integrated World Capitalism
goes hand in hand with a redefinition of the
ways surplus-value is extracted (computen-
COIVIMUNISTS LIKE Us 51
zation of the work process, spread of social
control through mass media, subjective inte-
gration by governmental apparatuses, etc....).
And as it has always been in the his-
tory of the exploitation of workers' struggles,
this leap forward of the organization of work
and of the State was "anticipated" by the
movements of the class struggle. The forms
of social subjectivity which emerged in 1968
gave rise to a "weaving" of molecular
struggles for liberation which are concerned
with objectives that are at once immediate
and long-term, loëal, everyday, trivial, yet
engaged nevertheless with the future of hu-
manity on a global scale. This operation was
of course very complex and, in many re-
spects, impossible to "sum up" within the
framework of a single historical sequence.
It is no less true that the pseudo-pro-
gressive dialectic of capitalism which tri-
umphed after the second world war was thus
completely blocked. After '68, the dynamic
between the different functions of capital
(constant and variable) and the interaction
between the class of capitalists and the so-
cial work force has radically changed con-
text; this is a result of the emergence of in-
52 FELIX GUATFARI & Torn NEGR1
creasingly important, heterogeneous arrange-
ments of subjectivity and sensibility. The law
of value has ceased to function - if it ever
worked in the manner in which it was de-
scribed - along with norms of economic
proportionality and even the ordinary mo-
dalities of simple class exploitation. The so-
cial hegemony of the new proletarian sub-
jectivities, once it was affirmed, had to ac-
quire the quality of irreversibility: no longer
would anything be able to prevent it from
revealing itself, regardless of the prevailing
relations of force, "the highs and the lows;"
indeed, particularly on the "front" of their
affirmation in the mass-media, no longer can
anything prevent these subjectivities from
being basic reference points for future
struggles. Capitalist and/or socialist restruc-
turation does not automatically refer to rela-
tively rational laws. It is not "scientific" -
no matter how sophisticated the theoretical
devices and the instruments of prediction
which it employs: it is essentially repressive.
The computerization [inforinatisation] of the
social is inseparable from its mechanization
and its militarization, in such a way that the
systematic production of information tends
CoMMuNIsTs LIKE Us 53
to be substituted for the search for it. Such
are the zones of strategic importance that the
circuits of reproduction which support life
and the struggle are more and more con-
trolled, ordered, and, ultimately, repressed in
a preventive fashion. Life time thus finds it-
self tightly fastened onto the military time of
capital.
The time of capital, or the capacity to
translate every sequence of life into terms of
exchange, and of overdetermination with the
urgency and the necessity of the operations
of economic quafltification and of political
command; terror, or the capacity to annihi-
late all those who refuse to submit to it: this
is what the reshuffling of the traditional func-
tions of the state, and their unlimited pene-
tration of people's attitudes, sensibility and
minds, amounts to. By threatening the very
foundations of being, the state manages to
control the singular flow of our lives, sub-
jecting it to the rhythm of capitalistic time.
Once it became clear that no law, nor other
norm, could ever mediate between the capi-
tal and the proliferation of collective subjec-
tivities, terror became the only way to secure
the resumption to capitalistic and socialistic
54 FELIx GUATFART & TONI NEGRI
accumulation in the 70's. It is under the im-
petus of this terror that the nuclear state be-
came the central figure of Integrated World
Capitalism.
At present the club of nuclear powers
subjects on a large scale all nations and
peoples to its multicentered networks; but it
also dictates in details the countless conflicts
and local strifes which poison life on this
earth, repressing or fueling them at will. In
the Third World, since the so-called period
of "decolonization," all these conflicts make
up some kind of world war that doesn't dare
call itself by that name. Nuclear terror is at
the root of every kind of oppression and over-
determines the relationships of exploitation
between social groups at both political and
micro-political levels. Thus threat and intimi-
dation seep through all the pores of the thin
skin of nuclear deterrence, which doesn't ex-
clude more direct forms of intervention. The
ultimate goal, as always, is to force people
to condone their misery and political impo-
tence. Capitalism answers: "No future" to the
rise of new forms of proletarian subjectivity,
countering their offensive with state terror.
At this juncture the word "democ-
COMMUNISTS Lam Us 55
racy" begs redefinition. The word "commu-
nism" has clearly been defaced, but the word
democracy itself has been trashed and muti-
lated. From the Greek polis to the popular
uprisings of the Renaissance and Reforma-
tion, from the proletarian rebellions that co-
existed with the great liberal revolutions,
democracy has always been synonymous with
the legitimation of power through the people.
This legitimation, always concrete, punctual,
material, took specific forms, breaking away
from a divine or absolute tradition.
With democracy, legitimacy is pri-
marily human, spatially and temporally de-
fined.
We're all subjected to Integrated
World Capitalism because it is impossible to
locate the source of its power.
If we try to go back to its source, all
we find is subjection to the second, third, nth
degree.
The origin of power recedes higher
and higher up and can be sized up in relation
to the depth of our own impotence. Political
relationships - called "democratic" - as
we experience them on a daily basis, are at
best trompes-l'oeil when they don't throw us
56 FELIX GUATFARI & TONI NEGIU
straight into pain and despair. This is the
common feature, the unavoidable axiom of
the capitalist or socialist restructuration of
the political powers.
II. NORTH / SOUTH:
TERROR AND HUNGER
As we have begun to see, the capital-
ist and/or socialist reaction of the 70s inte-
grates the world market according to a de-
sign for the exploitation of work and for po-
litical control which evolves in a homogene-
ous manner. The fundamental transition, in
this sense, begins with the phase of nixonian
initiative in the monetary and international
political arenas. Between 1971 and 1973, a
series of operations lent a political character
to the multi-national network of exploitation
which was already implanted in the world
market. The take-off of the dollar relative to
the gold standard and the petroleum crisis
articulated, under the same monetary com-
mand, (subtracted from all questions of value)
the rules for the organization of work and
those of the productive hierarchy on an inter-
Co1uvIuN1sTs LIKE Us 57
national level. The petroleum crisis emptied
the treasuries of countries and pushed finan-
cial centralization and unification to the point
of paroxysm. Initially, this operation ap-
peared, during the Kissinger era, as a great
shock. The divisions within the capitalist and!
or socialist political personnel reverberated
successively in the Trilateral Commission,
then through the agreements and the coopta-
tions within Integrated World Capitalism, that
is, in the new arrangements of the political
will of domination. It is on this foundation
that the effective political cartography of
exploitation on a world scale is sketched out.
Capitalist integration determines certain fun-
damental polarities around which move de-
pendent sub-systems, in partial rupture with
the hierarchies of power which overcode the
struggles for liberation and the class struggles,
- that permit capitalist integration to allow
itself the luxury, on the level of these sub-
systems, of large scale modifications. At the
heart of this complex play of multicentered
systems, which disjoin the flows of struggle
and carry out destabilizations and/or strate-
gic stabilizations, a transnational mode of pro-
duction is consolidated. Throughout these
58 FELIx GUATFARI & TONI NEGR
systemic ensembles, one finds the immense
enterprise of the production of cybernetic
subjectivity [subjectivité informatisee] which
regulates the networks of dependence and the
processes of marginalization. The working
class and the socially productive proletariat
of the central metropolitan countries are by
virtue of this fact subject to the exponential
competition of the proletariat of the large
metropolises of under-development. The pro-
letariats of the most developed countries thus
are literally terrorized by the spectacle of the
extermination by hunger which Integrated
World Capitalism imposes on the marginal-
ized (and often limotropic) countries. The
industrial reserve army, dominated by a new
law of absolute pauperism, is currently con-
stituted on a continental basis. Capitalist and!
or socialist command, multiplied into poly-
centric subaltern sub-systems, brings together
the highest rates of exploitation with areas
of poverty and death. For all that, the
struggles for liberation have not been mili-
tarily or politically strangled. But, within the
frame of these different sub-systems, Inte-
grated World Capitalism has not ceased to
stimulate fratricidal wars for the conquest of
COMMUNISTS Lii Us 59
intermediary degrees of participation in inte-
gration. The enemy has become the poor,
those poorer than oneself. If theory has ever
had the need to evaluate the basis of power
and of command over human life, it finds in
this a convincing example, in that the es-
sence of the problem turns out to be in pro-
duction and in the organization of work, in
the frightening capitalist voraciousness which
structures them on a world scale and which
subjugates them within the frame of the gen-
eralized mass-mediated, cybernetic [informa-
tique] integration of poles of domination.
To a certain extent, the poor find
themselves produced twice by this system:
by exploitation and by marginalization and
death. Terror, which in the metropolitan coun-
tries is incarnated as the potential for nuclear
extermination, is actualized, in the marginal-
ized countries, as extermination by famine.
Let it be clear, nevertheless, that there is noth-
ing "peripheral" in this last design: in fact,
there are only differences of degree between
exploitation, destruction by industrial and
urban pollution, welfare conceived as a sepa-
rating out of zones of poverty, and the exter-
mination of entire peoples, such as those
60 FELIx GUAITARI & ToM NEGRI
which occur in the continents of Asia, Af-
rica, and Latin America.
It is worth taking proper note the
newness of the forms of control implemented
by I.W.C. [Integrated World Capitalism]. The
strategies of tenor and of repression tend to
be more and more transversal, punctual, and
sudden.
Each piece of earth, each geo-politi-
cal segment, has become a potential enemy
frontier. The world has been transformed into
a labyrinth within which one can fall at any
moment, at the will of the destructive op-
tions of the multinational powers.
A practice of piracy, corresponding
to the current phase of over-maturation of
capital, has been substituted for the politics
of power of the period of maturity of imperi-
alist capitalism. Flotillas of hyper-power [sur-
puissances] plow the oceans and the seas the
same as Morgan and the Dutch.
We should prepare for the settling of
accounts between the submarines of the capi-
talist and/or socialist nuclear buccaneers. But
it is not just in the explicitly military earthly,
maritime, and aerial arenas that the perma-
nent war ofI.W.C. against world society takes
CoivIuNIsTs Lam Us 61
place. It is also in the ensemble of civil, so-
cial, economic, and industrial domains. And,
there as well, according to infinitely differ-
entiated, transversal filiations of operators of
power, who are beyond the control of com-
mon humans, beyond union or political con-
trol - at least in the traditional sense - and
in the middle of which can be found mixed
up: multinationals, the Mafias, the military
industrial complexes, the secret services, even
the Vatican. On all levels, on all scales, eve-
rything is permitted: speculation, extortion,
provocations, destabilizations, blackmail,
massive deportations, genocide... In this viru-
lent phase of decadence, the capitalist mode
of production seems to rediscover, intact, the
ferociousness of its origins.
All these modalities are inscribed
within the same continuum of integration: of
information, command, and profit. If it is true
that for a long time, the global struggles of
"communist liberation" will develop - at
least in the imagination of revolutionaries -
along the East-West axis, one must also ac-
knowledge that the fundamental contradic-
tion which runs through the Integrated Capi-
talist mode of production today on a world
62 FELIx GUATrARI & Tor.a NEGifi
scale is distributed emblematically between
the North and the South. If Red Square ever
represented a light of hope, the socialist sys-
tem has currently become the supreme stage
of the degeneration of capitalism arid is an
integral part of the multivalent axis of North-
South exploitation. Capitalist and/or social-
ist restructuring in the '70s has stitched to-
gether the old modes of production, redis-
tributing the functions of the players, and re-
organizing on a world scale the division of
exploitation.
It is respectable to say, among the
western intelligentsia, that, for strategic rea-
sons or for old maoist memories, the coun-
tries of really existing socialism and, in par-
ticular the Soviet Union, constitute a greater
threat to Europe and the countries of the Third
World than the U.S.
This is not at all our point of view;
we do not believe that the West can be pre-
ferred to the East. In the sense that we con-
sider ourselves "citizens of the world," we
are not concerned with the existing antago-
nism between the two super-powers. Peril-
ous, debilitating, dramatic - this antagonism
is no less in certain regards factitious and
Corvm'Iur'4iism Lris Us 63
mystificatory, in the sense that it is overde-
termined by a fundamental functional agree-
ment relative to the subjugation of the pro-
ductive force of the european proletariats and
to the appropriation of a quasi-gratuitous area
of expansion and provisioning in raw mate-
rials and in labor force on the other conti-
nents.
Without calling on, in the "last in-
stance," a final marxist referent, but simply
in the light of good sense and of a percep-
tion of everyday international relations, it
seems to us that the current rise in East-West
tenSion has above all as an object the mask-
ing of the destruction by hunger of entire
peoples, in an equal fever of reproduction
through profit, which torments the dominant
castes, as much in the U.S.A. as in the
U.S.S.R.. In the long term, therefore: corn-
plementarity and complicity in order to as-
sure a common domination on a world scale
over the division of labor and its exploita-
tion.
And it is precisely on this scale that
the "civilizing mission" of capital has dem-
onstrated the extent of its ferociousness and
its absurdity. On that scale, poverty, margi-
64 FEUX GUATI'ARI & TOM NEGRI
nalization, extermination, and genocide are
revealed to be the ultimate consequences of
a mode of production which set itself up in a
till-now peaceful symbiosis with the struggles
of the working class of the metropolitan coun-
tries. But, faced with the crisis of its own
system of profit and with the degradation of
its own principles of legitimation, capital is
now constrained to have recourse (and to
theorize that recourse) to the most extreme
measures. The era of the over-maturity of
capitalism reveals the violence of its origins
in a climate of panic due to the weakening
of its motivations. The capitalist restructur-
ing of the world market, undertaken since
the 70s, has entailed an extraordinary accel-
eration of the process of integration, while
separating out its effects under the form of
paradoxical crises. The capitalist integration
of the world market, if it has not crowned
the dreams of the promotion of a more hu-
mane civilization, has shown, on the con-
trary, to what level the cruelty and cynicism
of the capitalist mode of production can be
raised. The attempts to overcome the inter-
nal contradictions initiated by the emergence
of new collective subjectivities founded on
COMMIJNISIS LIKE Us 65
the widening of the market, despite the cau-
tion of political personnel of the Kissinger
or Carter type, have not only put an end to
the internal crisis of the central metropolitan
countries, but have pushed it to the point of
paroxysm and have spread its devastating ef-
fects over the entire globe.
The space dominated by capital,
which is subdivided, fragmented, segmented,
and functionalized according to the ends of
capital's command, is opening as a new ter-
rain of resistance and of conquest. The ex-
treme weapons of extermination and margi-
nalization will not succeed forever in block-
ing the process of recomposition, whose vi-
tality one can already detect. It is important
to underscore the correlation between the
level attained by capitalist restructuring and
the unprecedented dimensions of the crisis
of the past decade. One can thus note, on the
one hand, that even in the most terrible of
tests, the new social dissidence has not
stopped weighing on the situation and accel-
erating the crisis, and on the other hand, that
the capitalist instruments of control are prov-
ing to be less and less adapted to their end,
more and more ineffective.
66 FEux GUATFARI & TONI NEGRI
It was no doubt beginning in 1982
that the cycle of restructuration, which be-
gan between 1971 and 1973, launched a first
decisive barrage, when the most indebted
countries of the Third World threatened the
consortium of banks with the possibility of
declaring bankruptcy, in response to the un-
precedented politics of deflationary strangu-
lation which they were undergoing. It seems
that in an irreversible fashion, a new type of
process of liberation and of largescale self-
organization came into being. We will return
to this point.
III. THE RIGHT IN POWER
The temporal and spatial mechanism
for controlling struggles, put in place during
the capitalist and/or socialist restructuration
of the world of producing, invested new fig-
ures of class struggle. In those places where
the Right triumphed, Integrated World Capi-
talism succeeded in institutionalizing these
new figures and in making them act as a mo-
tor of restructuration. As the reactionary cycle
of the 70s puts them on display for us, the
instruments set in motion by Integrated World
Cov1uNIsTs Ln Us 67
Capitalism in order to channel and even pro-
duce class struggle within the frame of insti-
tutional integration reside: 1) in its ability to
put in place systems of transnational compe-
tition between class sectors; 2) in the utiliza-
tion of deflationary monetary politics which
increase unemployment; 3) in the reconver-
sion which it effectuates in the politics of
welfare, toward a "controlled" increase of
poverty. This politics is accompanied by a
pulverizing, molecular repression of all at-
tempts at resistance and at the free expres-
sion of needs. It is essential that the control
that it promotes succeeds in becoming effec-
tive in the collective imaginary,' thus initiat-
ing a situation of diffuse crisis within which
it will attempt to separate: 1) that part of the
proletariat with which incumbent power re-
lies on negotiating a guarantee of reproduc-
tion and 2) the immense mass of those ex-
cluded or "non-guaranteed."
This division is multiplied infinitely
and hierarchized in the labor market, in which
the competition between workers makes it-
self felt, and beyond, on the "social and in-
stitutional market" in which all the other sec-
tors of the population are constrained to
 COMMUNISTS LIKE Us
68 FELIx GUArrARI & ToNI NEGRI
"make themselves valuable."
The revolutionary events of '68, as
well as the material transformations of the
mode of production, have shown the deter-
mining weight which the working class con-
tinued to possess on the social stage. The
spirit of competition between workers was
thus weakened in favor of a recognition of
revolutionary objectives concerning a grow-
ing number of categories of oppressed people.
But with the return of the Right to power
during the '70s, a resegregation of the work-
ing class, which falls back on "already at-
tained advantages," its guarantees, and its
corporate privileges, has taken place. We
have seen the paradox of an institutionaliza-
tion which preforms the working class into
its own enemy (this time, one can really speak
of a "new working class"). In this context,
the struggles were condemned to remain in-
stitutionalized, to be piloted by Integrated
World Capitalism; frequently they even re-
vealed themselves to be the best supports for
political and social conservatism. (In particu-
lar, on the molecular terrain of capital's sub-
sumption of social work and against the so-
cial diffusion of revolutionary needs and
69
transformational desires.) It seems to us es-
sential to insist on this point: today, Stakha-
nov, the superior dignity of the worker with
calloused hands, (for whom Reagan has a
certain nostalgia) a certain conception of
worker centrality, and the entire old imagi-
nary manipulated by the unions and the left,
in a systematic misapprehension of the great
majority of the "non-guaranteed" proletariat,
has irredeemably gone by the wayside.
"Really existing socialism" has be-
come a privileged instrument of the division
of the metropolitan proletariat, a weapon di-
rectly manipulated by capitalist conservatism.
Which does not mean, nevertheless, that the
working classes, in themselves, can no longer
in the future develop decisive struggles within
the dynamic of social transformations. But
only on the condition that they are radically
reshaped by the molecular revolutions which
run through them.
In fact, capitalist and/or socialist
structuration in the '70s directly confronted
the new revolutionary subjectivities, con-
straining them to interiorize their potential
consciousness and obliging them to be under
the thumb of systems of technological con-
70 FELIx GUATFARI & ToM NEGRI
trol and a battery of government apparatuses
which are more and more sophisticated. The
fundamental objective of Integrated World
Capitalism was to attain a maximal expan-
sion of the integrated productive dimension
on the social level and on the geo-political
level, segregated from the reintroduction of
poverty, of hunger, and of terror as an in-
strument of division. The victory of the right
was based on its ability to neutralize the re-
composition of that revolutionary subjectiv-
ity which found itself exposed to the great
difficulty of reconstituting unitary lines of
attack against exploitation. This reactionary
turn-around succeeded in assuming, in re-
versing, and in exploding everything which,
since 68, was revealed as a new power of the
proletariat - that is, the ensemble of social
components and of collective capacities for
articulating the molecular multiplicity of its
needs and its desires. The division imposed
through instruments of economic and insti-
tutional violence was consolidated through
the promotion of a symbolism of destruction
pushed to an extreme. "Exterminism" became
the referent value par excellence. Extermina-
tion by submission or death, as the ultimate
CoMviur'ns1s Ln Us 71
horizon of capitalist development. The only
law of value which capitalism and/or social-
ism recognizes today: it is the blackmail of
death. We will not let ourselves be taken in
by this deathly realism. "It is right to revolt."
The responsibility of the traditional
organizations of the workers' movement,
which remained prisoner to the illusory
choice between capitalism and socialism, was
thus decisive. It is necessary to recognize
that the fact that the development of the mode
of production and the maturation of collec-
tive consciousness completely passed them
by does not in any way eliminate the conse-
quences of their drift, mystification, and pa-
ralysis of all initiative in the workers' move-
ment. The inertia of the social movements,
which revealed itself in numerous situations,
the inability of the revolutionary movement
to reconstitute itself on politically new foun-
dations, the incapability of the transforma-
tion process to impose itself in its entirety -
all are essentially conditioned by the monop-
oly of political representation and of the
imaginary, which the alliance between capi-
talist and socialist personnel has sealed for
decades. This alliance is based on establish-
72 FEux GUATFARI & TONI NEGRI
ing the model of the double labor market:
that of guaranteed workers and that of the
- with socialism legitimiz-
non-guaranteed
ing only the first. From this has resulted a
frozen society, comparable to that of the An-
cien Régime, but, in the end, a society equally
untenable because it is undermined by innu-
merable molecular forces expressing its pro-
ductive essence. This is the source of its nag-
ging thematics of security, of order, and of
repression and of its imaginary of urgency,
its obsession with crisis, the impression it
gives of being able to act only a step at a
time, without retreat and without a coherent
project. Caught in the same drift, capitalism
and socialism now constitute the two pillars
of conservatism and in certain cases of quasi-
fascist [fascisante] reaction.
It is no less true that a new revolu-
tion took off in '68. It is not the fantasms of
the "death of the political" or of the "implo-
sion of the social" which will change any-
thing. Beginning in the '70s, capitalism and!
or socialism was constrained to make a pa-
rade of its failure on questions of social prog-
ress, of the coherent management of eco-
nomic and social relations on an international
CoMMUMSTS Ln Us 73
scale, of impulsion in the vital domains of
technico-scientific creation. It was revealed
for what it is, that is, a ferocious and irra-
tional system of repression, which is an ob-
stacle to the development of collective pro-
duction arrangements and which inhibits the
movements of the valorization and capitali-
zation of wealth which it engenders. The
world market, far from responding to the prin-
ciples which liberalism attempts to rees-
only
tablish, is an instrument "blocking" for
poverty and death, "chaining-up" for margi-
nalization and planetary discipline, supported
by nuclear terror. We inevitably return to the
point: the ultimate "reason" of capitalism and!
or socialism is its impossible tendency to-
ward a sole paradigm: that of a passion to
abolish everything which is not in accord with
maintaining its power.
But this passion also threatens instru-
mental reason itself, from inside. In effect,
the will towards exclusion and segregation
in Integrated World Capitalism tends to turn
against itself, by threatening the consistency
of its own systems of political communica-
tion and reducing to near zero its ability to
objectively gauge relations of force. Thus one
74 FELIX GUArrARI & TONI NEGRI
COMMUNISm LIKE Us 75

can beware that before us opens an era of

the great paranoiacs of power. 4
If this is so, the task of reconquering
THE REVOLUTION CONTINUES
the meaning of work, begun in 68, is identi-
cal to the liberation of life and the reconsti-
I. RECOMPOSITION OF
tution of reason. For everyone and every-
THE MOVEMENT
where: promote the potential carried by the
new singularities!
In the context of Integral World Capi-
talism's restructuring of production, under-
taken since '68, the new revolutionary sub-
jectivities are learning to recognize the rup-
tures imposed by the enemy, to measure their
consistency and their effects. The first fun-
damental determination of Integrated World
Capitalism is that, independently of socio-
logical segmentations, it produces a model
of subjectivity that is at least tripolar, syn-
chronically cutting across all sorts of uncon-
scious collective levels, personal conscious-
nesses, and group subjectivities (familial,
ethnic, national, racial, etc).
These three poles are: an elitist pole,
which comprises both the managerial and
technocratic strata of the East and of the
West, as well as those of the Third World; a
guaranteed pole, cutting across the different
 CoruvruNIs1s Ln
76 FELIX GUATFAPJ & ToM NEGRI
specifications of class; and a non-guaranteed
pole, which runs through each social stratum
equally.
Under these conditions, the new revo-
lutionary subjectivities proclaim, from their
point of origin, a desire for peace, collective
security, and minimal safeguards against un-
employment and poverty. One finds a fear of
the hell of the absence of guarantees at the
heart of the three poles of subjectivity: among
entirely deprived groups, among proletarian
groups already somewhat guaranteed by wage
labor and welfare, as well as among certain
sectors of the elite whose status is made sys-
tematically precarious. Thus the essential
basis of contemporary production is consti-
tuted by this fluctuating mass and continu-
ous mixture of "guarantism" and "non-guar-
antism." The non-guaranteed constitute a fun-
damental point of support for the constitution
of capitalist power: it is in terms of them
that the institutions of repression and margi-
nalization find their consistency. But in
counterpoint, they assume a social role within
the new framework of power and exploita-
tion, because of the values and productive
potential of which they are the bearers. They
Us 77
are also focal points of imagination and
struggle which are capable of catalyzing sin-
gular becomings, of bringing to light other
references, other praxes, appropriate for
breaking the immense machine of discipline
and control of the collective force of produc-
tion.
The history of the struggles of the
'70s has already sketched the process of re-
composition and of social liberation. A num-
ber of matrices of rupture were opened then
by the new proletarian movements. What-
ever their diversity, they all originated in the
tremendous mutations of an increasingly
complex, over-powering, and deterritorial-
izing social productive force, and they all
affirm themselves with reinforced clarity
against the repressive normalizae1on and
restructuration brought about by social seg-
mentation and stratification. These phases of
struggle were most significant for workers
as an experience of discovery and compre-
hension of the cesuras and corporatist over-
codings imposed on the proletarian socius,
and as an experience of internal struggle
against the violence by which Integrated
World Capitalism has constantly tried to
78 FEux GUATrARI & Torsn NEGRI
interdict processes of innovation wherever
they are involved. Internal struggles thus re-
Inte-
cuperate the tripolar segmentation of
grated World Capitalism within the struggles
of each subjective component. Since this
always occurs at each phase in the emer-
their qual-
gence of a new social subjectivity,
ity, force, and cohesion is self-composed
[auto-agencée], the result of a collective self-
making. Need, consciousness, and produc-
tion are fused at the heart of such a process.
The '70s were thus marked by the continu-
ous emergence of moments of rupture punc-
tuating the capitalist and/or socialist attempts
at restructuration, all of which are character-
ized by new subjective problematics and by
a special collective effort to redefine their
perspective.
From 1977 in Italy to the "Great
Break" in Central Europe (Germany, Swit-
zerland, Holland), from the Iranian revolu-
tion to the period of Solidarity, to the re-
newal of revolutionary struggles in Central
America, to the enormously important lib-
eration movements that are beginning to erupt
in the Southern Cone... wherever we turn,
we find these principle characteristics of the
Coviu1'asTs Lua Us 79
project. The struggles that are internal and
antagonistic to the politics of reactionary
restructuration are mobilizing, either against
their repressive texture, or inside these proc-
esses of subjective development as a unify-
ing tension and as a self-liberating perspec-
tive. Revolutionary struggles have never "tar-
geted" to this extent the theoretical defini-
tion and the practical realization of an orien-
tation resting intrinsically on collective sub-
jectivation and implying, in consequence, the
destruction of all ideologies of an external
vanguard. Autonomy has never appeared with
more force as a primary objective. We re-
peat: there is nothing anarchic about this,
since it essentially has to do with a qualita-
tive autonomy, capable of apprehending the
social complexity of movements, and of
grasping it as a process of subjective conver-
gence, centered on the quality of life and on
the communitarian restructuring of produc-
tion goals, and since it is equally a matter,
by virtue of this reconstruction, of assuming
peace against all forms of terrorism and of
imposing mass negotiation as a basis of mo-
bilization and of organization.
It is obviously necessary to be very
80 FEux GUATFARI & ToM NEGR1
careful when we broach the question of the
experiences and the initiatives of the new
subjects. Frequently, during the course of the
events we have just evoked (from 1977 in
Italy forward), the action of these new sub-
jects has been presented, from a theoretical
point of view, as a hypostasis and, from a
practical point of view, as a linear function.
Once again, one risked falling into the old
mythology of "mass action." This has to do
with illusions that probably inevitably result
from deception and regression. But it would
be difficult to determine the stakes of the
theoretical elucidation of this question. The
theoretical struggle against such illusions
leads to patient acceptance, without reserva-
tion, of the real situation, that is, of the fact
that the universality of the proposition of
transformation must necessarily be diluted in
the multiplicity of movements, the contra-
dictory moments which characterize them and
in the "long term" of the movement of col-
lective imagination.
Before developing this point, we must
first insist on the constructive effort that the
new modes of subjectivation have already
accomplished on a stage profoundly changed
CovrrvIuNirsTs LIKE Us 81
in relation to the history and the traditions of
the revolutionary and workers' movements,
because of expanded competency and per-
formance in the arrangements of subjectivity
at work on that stage. Confronted by the
amplitude of the production of totalitarian
subjectivity by the capitalist States, the revo-
lutionary arrangements pose the problem of
the quality of life, of reappropriation, and of
self-production in an equally sizable dimen-
sion. Through a movement with multiple
heads and a proliferating organization, their
episodes of liberation will be capable of in-
vesting the entire spectrum of production and
reproduction.
Each molecular movement, each au-
tonomy, each minoritarian movement will
coalesce with an aspect of the real in order
to exalt its particular liberatory dimensions.
It will thus break with the schema of exploi-
tation that capital imposes as the dominant
reality. It is this new consciousness of the
modem proletariat - deterritorialized and
fluctuating - which will permit envisaging
the rupture of capitalist segmentation and the
refoniulation not of "commands," not of
programs, but of "diagrammatic propositions"
 CovfuN1sm Lwu Us
82 FEUx GUATI'ARI & ToM NEGRI
of communism and of liberation And it is
capitalist restructuration's hyper-reactionary
character that explains the positively cata-
strophic acceleration which the movement has
experienced since the beginning of the 80s.
Nonetheless this restructuration has not dam-
aged the emerging points of new proletarian
subjectivities; it has simply reduced their elas-
ticity. Numerous signs indicate to us that once
again the movement is on the verge of step-
ping forward to undo the repressive obstruc-
tions which have successfully blocked its
force during this last period.
If we return to the tripartition pro-
posed earlier and if we examine how the proc-
ess of recomposition runs through the elitist
pole, the guaranteed pole, and the non-guar-
anteed pole, we can discover the forceful-
ness with which the movement of new alli-
ances has posed its premises. This is imme-
diately evident once one takes into account
the fluidity of relations that the crisis has
introduced and continues to accentuate be-
tween the guaranteed and the non-guaran-
teed sectors. But this is no less evident when
one considers the articulations which the elit-
ist pole has with the two others. Many mdi-
83
viduals who evolve in management and at
the highest levels of the institutions of knowl-
edge were, during the past ten years, not only
implicated in the process of "precarization"
that is coterminal with their role and func-
tion, but also introduced to an elaborated criti-
cal consciousness regarding the legitimacy
of their status. The irrationality and the mad-
ness of the extended reproduction choices of
I.W.C., the obsession of the arms race and of
nuclear war, the vertigo of famine and geno-
cide which deepen the differences and en-
gender cleavages, to the point of pushing cer-
tain managerial elites to the point of refusal
and dissidence. This process, which is all too
frequently disfigured and made ridiculous
when it is reported in a propagandistic way,
nonetheless demonstrates the expansion of
resistance in the new forms of subjectivity.
Previously, one of the slogans of the com-
munists was the proposed importation of the
class struggle into the institutions: today we
note more modestly that the new subjects
are capable of exporting their values and their
antagonistic recommendations to the highest
levels of management and of the institutions
of knowledge. The true processes of dissi-
84 FEUx GUATrARI & TONI NEGR1
dence are not recuperable; it is not a com-
modity that can be sent to the enemy as a
gift.
In point of fact, the revolution con-
tinues. The irreversible character of the hith-
erto completed processes affirms itself. The
new subjectivities rearrange their political
identity by "assimilating" (that is, semiotizing
and smothering) the obstacles posed by the
adversary - including those that the adver-
sary has made them introject. The changing
characteristics of the collective force of la-
bor, the living forces of the non-guaranteed
urban proletariat, the transfinite network of
dissident discursive arrangements set them-
selves up as so many protagonists of the new
cycle of struggle.
II. THE TERRORIST INTERLUDE
The development of new subjectivi-
ties has undergone deep internal breaks dur-
mg the course of this process which result
primarily from the capitalist mode of pro-
duction that we have just described and from
the internal convulsions of the movements.
Co1'1rvIuNIsTs Lll'E Us 85
Each historical period can be affected by the
birth of elitist poles and by extremist surges
of self-exaltation which develop to the detri-
ment of the interests of the movements whose
interests they pretend to represent. That was
particularly evident during this period when
Integrated World Capitalism worked to de-
fend and reconstitute the model of a system-
atic segmentation of both social movements
and ideologies.
Terrorism was perhaps the deepest
and maddest cesura that revolutionaries ex-
perienced during the entire course ofthe '70s.
In the face of reactionary pressure exercised
by the State and by I.W.C. to block the lib-
eration movement, faced by attempts to di-
vide and force competition between differ-
ent exploited groups in order to freeze con-
stitutional and social relations at regressive
levels, and faced with the deathly rigidity of
the dominant power's formations, whole sec-
tors of the movement were seized by rage
and frustration. In the context of the molecu-
lar effervescence and maturation of new revo-
lutionary subjectivities, the State has an inter-
est in imposing a molar order of return to a
reinforced social dichotomy; it thus under-
 FELIx GUATTAiU & TONI NEG1U
86
takes to make a parade of its power by adopt-
ing drastic measures and in deploying highly
sophisticated mechanisms of control and re-
pression. For the same occasion, State ter-
rorism undertakes to destroy without distinc-
tion all political and existential dissidence.
On this terrain, I.W.C. has carried out
a veritable mobilization of State functions
and set going a new type of civil war: not
only by military and police means and by
states of emergency, but also by means of a
psychological and informational war and by
corresponding cultural and political strategies.
During the '70s, this sort of civil war
created a favorable basis for the development
of the most extreme reaction. In order to un-
derstand what happened then, it is necessary
to bear in mind the sizable stakes of the con-
test of force between, on the one hand, the
new desires and needs of the collective sub-
jectivity, and on the other hand, the different
components working for the restoration and
restructuration of production and command.
It is true that the civil war frequently gave
the State the chance to give itself powers
and the instigation to "react" against a situ-
ation that it no longer controlled. The new
CokwumsTs LIKE Us 87
revolutionary movements also have every-
thing to gain from clearly recognizing the
realities within which they operate. All the
more so because certain groups can have the
illusion of having some measure of control
by their own means over this sort of situ-
ation, by taking the risk of placing them-
selves on the molar terrain of confrontation
hoped for by the enemy, by identifying in
some sense with him, by entering fully into
the imaginary traps of political domination
which are dangled in front of the movement.
The '70s were thus years of a civil
war whose direction, imposed by I.W.C., led
to pure and simple exterminations, like those
of the Palestinians. One cannot deny that
within this context, a terrorism of worker and
proletarian origins sometimes managed to
take the initiative, but nevertheless without
ever stepping out of that vicious circle of
capitalist over-determination. Rather than
reducing that over-determination, such ter-
rorism only reinforced the will of the domi-
nant powers to isolate, to make examples of,
and to neutralizethe conflicts.
The perspective of the revolutionary
movement, in correspondence with real his-
88 FELIx GUATFARI & ToM NEGRI
torical transformations, manifests itself alto-
gether differently. How will the new subjec-
tive components be able to conquer supple-
mentary spaces of life and liberty? How, by
illuminating other types of force, intelligence,
and sensibility, can the power of the enemy
be deprived of its substance? These, more
appropriately, are the questions of the revo-
lutionary movement.
From all points of view, red terror-
ism was a disastrous interlude for the move-
ment. But especially for the way it relaunched
ideological and abstract centralist conceptions
of organization. Its crazy search for central
points of confrontation became redundant
with an ossified leninism, which is discon-
nected from all historical materiality, reduced
entirely to a statist interpretation, a sort of
paranoid point of reference which it sought
to impose on the recomposition of the move-
ment. Nothing is more urgent than to have
done with this false alternative. Access to
the movement must be denied to these ab-
surd messengers of the past. Red terrorism
has only one end: that of failure and despair.
It has only one function: to stem the im-
mense liberatory potential which has revealed
CoMvIuNIsTs Lin Us 89
itself at the heart of this heavy period of re-
action through which we are going. In as
much as it complied with the rhythms of his-
tory and with the programrnings of the op-
ponent, red terrorism has revealed itself for
what it is: a paradoxical form of conserva-
tism.
But haven't the capitalist formations
of power on the same occasion taken the
measure of the autonomous movements and
secreted "antibodies" capable of robbing them
of power? It is precisely this question which
confronts the militants of prior generations
who "re-emerge," as from a fog, from the
great reactionary disaster.
The terrorist interlude of proletarian
origin in the '70s has become exceedingly,
mortally dangerous for the progress of those
revolutionary processes which had begun to
detotalize, to deterritorialize the stratifications
of power, at all levels. Clearly, the ideolo-
gies that nurtured it should be forcefully
avoided as so many biases which can only
adulterate the struggles of the real movement
and lead them to defeat. Given this, it is nec-
essary to recognize that this terrorist wave
posed a real problem through radically false
90 FEux GUAITARI & Tor.ji NEGR1
premises and responses: how can the resis-
tance to reaction be linked to a new type of
organization? The correct response to this
question, and the strategic line which fol-
lows from it, are already in the movement, at
those points where it constitutes itself through
an institutional mode without going astray
on the paths of statist legitimation. It has to
do with constructing a new society, a new
politics, a new womens' movement, an other
workers' movement, other youth movements.
"Other," "different," "new" - always the
same feeble words to index the vectors of
happiness and imagination which are capable
of overthrowing the sclerotic world where
politics is nothing but frustration and para-
noia, where society is nothing but the triumph
of conformism, where the workers' move-
ment gets bogged down in corporatism, the
womens' movement in the introjection of
subordination, the youth movement in all
sorts of drugs, and where, finally, the limit
between the demand for power and terrorism
continues to be confining.
It is equally possible that the external
cesura was the symptom of an internal ill-
ness. It would be absurd to deny that the
Coivntuji Lm Us 91
processes of recomposition also carry dog-
matic and sectarian elements, "viruses" from
old stratifications which threaten them from
inside. It is thus the articulation between
immediacy and mediation, tactics and strat-
egy - which can only be established by way
of multilateral and practical relations -
which risks running headlong into chaos,
maniacal agitation, and provocation. And if
it has been so, then the only possible way to
heal this kind of paranoia is to be found by
the revelation and exaltation of its symptoms,
the exploration of its etiology, the disengag-
ing of the desires of which it is the expres-
sion and their radical liberation from all over-
codings by the capitalist death drives.
The problem of the recourse to force
has not for all this disappeared from our ho-
rizon. But we consider it to be all the more
politically efficacious if the forces in ques-
tion are diversified, multiplied by a thousand
links to thought and the imagination. Force
is the body - and we want to reconstruct
the movement outside the dead body which
tradition has left us; we want to reinvent a
living, real body, to live and to experience a
physiology of collective liberation. It is on
92 FELIx GUATFARI & Tor.n NEGRI
CovIMur'nsTs Lu
the basis of this hypothesis of an other type
of expression of power [puissance] that the
movements of the '70s reaffirmed the urgency
of liberation. There is no anarchism in this.
Because the movement remains none the less
collective and challenges individualist implo-
sion. We distrust spontaneist myths for such
as they devalue the dimensions of eveiyday-
ness and of patient reformulation of the prob-
lems with which we are confronted. Neither
is it idealism. Because here the body is, all
at once, material expression of the subject
and content, end and goal. Promoting it has
the consequence of relativizing the formal-
ism of the representation of contract and of
law, to the benefit of the alliance and of the
common project of the productive forces. The
elimination of the concept of the practice of
terrorism is thus correlative at once to the
negation of out-dated political points of ref-
erence - even if spontaneist - and the af-
firmation of a radical materialism. This as
well we have learned during the '70s, with
their awful terrorist interlude.
Us 93
III. A NEW
REVOLUTIONARY POLITICS
The recomposition of the movement
is undergoing a reorganization of its fronts
of struggle as a process of self-valorization
and auto-production at the highest level of
subjectivation.
The rediscovery of politics, that is,
the foundation of an other politics, calls for
the deployment of social forces on fields of
application which are indefinitely open. These
forces depend, of course, on the intensity of
the needs revealed by the immediate struggles
and thus on the struggle against the obstacle,
but also on the positivity of the world which
we wish to construct, on the values which
we wish to promote. This is not a dialectic.
In any event, not a dialectic like that glori-
ous and painful one which presides over the
sociological class struggle - a rhetoric aris-
ing more out of confusion than of science. In
fact, the negative and the positive are an-
chored here in the materiality of possible op-
tions. And one could conceive neither a tran-
sition nor a "qualitative leap" which would
permit a passage from war to peace, from
 Coi'iMuMsTs LIKE Us 95
94 FEux GUATrAIU & Torsji NEGRI

over, the anti-nuclear struggles opened spe-

death to life, from the destruction of being to
cific horizons in terms of the exploitation
the construction of the world. At this phase
and accumulation of the scientific labor force.
of the movement and of historical develop-
The struggles of technical and scientific
ment, it seems to us that only a continuous
workers, which will be revealed as essential
and multidimensional revolution can consti-
to the development of the communist pro-
tute an alternative to the failed projects of
gram, are beginning to illuminate the com-
archeo-socialism. This obviously does not
plex dimensions of an alternative use of sci-
entail holding to general considerations. Each
ence. Moreover, it is at the point of articula-
singular component of the movement devel- tion between this use and the collective force
ops systems of value which should be con- of production that the decisive mutation of
sidered in themselves, without requiring ei-
the communist project will occur. It is on the
ther "translation" or "interpretation. These
116

same continuum of struggles against exploi-

systems are permitted to evolve in their own tation and for positive alternatives that, more
appropriate directions and to exist at times and more, the capitalist and/or socialist ex-
in contradictory relationships with each other.
ploitation of time will be put in question and
They don't participate any the less in the that a new type of commumtarian organiza-
same project of constructing a new type of
tion of the productive forces will begin.
social reality.
Struggles against the labor process and its
In the '70s, a first experiment at bring-
overcoding of time; struggles for alternative
ing together the revolutionary processes be-
housing arrangements and for another way
gan on a positive terrain: that of the anti- of conceptualizing domestic sociality, neigh-
nuclear and ecology movements. They were
borliness, and cooperation between segments
immediately linked and implicated in alter- of the socius.
native programs for the recovery of produc-
This has to do with positively conju-
tive energy. Thus, ecology was not trapped
gating the critique of science and the struggle
by nostalgia or by protest; it demonstrated
against exploitation, for example, to conju-
that a new style of action was possible. More-
96 FELD GUATFARI & TONI NEGRI
gate research on alternative energy sources
and the practical reconstruction of the pro-
ductive community. It is only at this price
that we will succeed in grasping the coher-
ence of the current proletarian projects
through the multiplicity and diversity of the
initiatives which actualize those projects and
the wealth of their productive end. We take
for granted the fact that the destruction of
property, as the fundamental juridical form
of capitalist accumulation, and the destruc-
tion of bureaucratic control, as the funda-
mental juridical form of socialist accumula-
tion, in one indissociable intertwining in
which they present themselves today for
analysis, constitute the essential conditions
for the liberation of science and the elabora-
tion of an open and communitarian social
life and for the development of diffuse and
creative forms of organization of social work
which correspond to the new proletarian sub-
jectivities. What we are evoking here is not
a utopia. It is the explication of a real move-
ment, which innumerable traces and indices
designate as a power in action.
The elaboration of the political econ-
omy of this transition has become an urgent
CoNmwms-rs LIKE Us 97
problem; the communist program will broach
a new level of consciousness only to the ex-
tent that it makes advances regarding these
questions. In terms of this, it goes without
saying that the specific programs of the dif-
ferent movements cannot help but become
intertwined. It is the same regarding their
passage to organizational form, by way of
diverse attempts of a highly spontaneous
character. A priority in this domain is the
positivity of perspectives which forbid laps-
ing into jacobinism or leninism. We must
insist again on the materiality of these pas-
sages, on the manner in which they succeed
in demonstrating their force, even in the worst
sectors of capitalist reaction, and how they
succeed in planting in the very marrow of
the bosses and the bureaucrats the thorn of
their changing perspective.
We have already invoked a major il-
lustration of this conjunction of radically
heterogeneous vectors for overcoming the
worst plans of the reactionary employers: that
of the international monetary system. In the
summer of 1982, the declaration of non-pay-
ment of debts and the threat of bankruptcy
among the large Latin American countries
98 FELIx GUATFAIU & TONI NEGRI
struck a perhaps fatal blow against Re-
aganomics The internal resistance of the
working classes in the developed countries
to unemployment and inflation thus found it-
self objectively associated with the suppres-
sion of the proletariats of the Third World,
themselves undermined by poverty and fam-
ine. The objective character of this new de
facto alliance, its considerable political inci-
dences, does not indicate to us the historical
limits of reaction: they confirm the potential
for intervention in collective arrangements
of subjectivity, when they succeed in joining
their interventions along the fault line of the
crisis. For twelve years after 1971, from
Nixon to Reagan, big multinational capital
succeeded in instituting a perfidious mecha-
nism for augmenting productivity within the
framework of a general immobilization of
the relations of force and of the distribution
of incomes - in 1982, it was the very bases
of capitalist power which were put in ques-
tion, as a result of the conjoined resistance
of the diverse sectors of the international pro-
letariat. One must admit that during this long
period of "historical latency," the collective
subjectivity had to continue to metabolize its
CouviuNIsTs Ln Us 99
needs and its desires. If not, how could such
a crisis have been possible - the first in the
present historical cycle of reaction, but of a
striking conspicuousness. This is a clear ex-
ample of what we mean when we speak of
the "materiality of the passageways of the
recomposition of subjectivity."
Parallel to a growing consciousness
of the irreversible character of the crisis of
the capitalist mode of production arises a
fundamental problem: capitalism and/or so-
cialism control the means of destroying the
world; will they use these means to defend
their domination? And to what point? Now,
it is precisely around this threat that the re-
composition of revolutionary subjectivities
and the development of movements has par-
tially reconstructed its highest profile. It is in
the struggles for peace that the movement
attains its richest and most complex expres-
sion. In a sinuous and continuous fashion,
the struggles are carried out across the en-
emy territory, preventing him from attaining
the maximum concentration of the destruc-
tive force that defines his project and, in a
continuous way, from attaining his force of
persuasion and concentration. One could
100 FEux GUATFARI & TOM NEGRI
almost say that this "guerrilla of peace,"
which is taking root in the spaces between
individual consciousnesses, constructed on a
communitarian basis, collectively synchroniz-
ing the dispositions and sequences of the
domination which constitutes them in terms
of resistance and struggle, all of this is al-
ready a force, a project, which makes us re-
linquish the defensive, which surpasses the
war of position and which can inspire us to a
war ofmovement. What other method is there
for struggling for peace than to encircle, to
empty the enemy strategies of their substance,
to destructure them from inside? In this re-
gard, is it necessary to distinguish the ad-
vancement of the pacifist struggle from that
of recomposing the projects of revolutionary
action? Not at all, because, we repeat, the
struggle for peace carries within it the high-
est possible alternative potentialities.
We hope no one will think us so naive
as to imagine that there are not as many
scoundrels as honest people under the mantle
of pacifism. In certain countries, the peace
movement is instrumentalized and perverted
by methods which recall to us those abject
times of the "stalinist peace." Neither are we
COMMUNISTS LIK-E Us 101
taken by a "peace" of social neutralization
which would accommodate, for example, the
muzzling of the Polish people. On the con-
trary, we conceive the struggle for peace as
a loom on which the collective struggles for
liberation can be woven. That is, for us, the
struggle is not synonymous with the status
quo. It has to do fundamentally, therefore,
with lifting that hypothesis of the overdeter-
mination of death which weighs down all
the capitalist and/or socialist relations of pro-
duction. The struggle for peace is a struggle
for a democracy in which the liberty of indi-
viduals would be guaranteed and in which
the question of the res publica and of the
goals of economic development would find
their legitimation in the community. Green
is born neither from the red of the socialist
regimes nor from the black of the capitalist
regimes. It is born from refusing poverty and
of oppression wherever it proliferates and
from the urgent desire to be freed from the
fear of capitalist control wherever it is im-
posed. Everyone tells us: "You should choose
sides." Some tell the Afghans that they would
be occupied by the Americans if the Rus-
sians left. But would that be worse? "If the
102 FELIX GUATrARI & Toin NEGRI
Americans occupy us," those involved re-
spond, "we will all become Scythians." Oth-
ers tell us we would be occupied by the Rus-
sians if we refuse the American umbrella.
But would that be worse? If the Russians
occupy our country we will all become Poles.
We have had enough of all of this blackmail.
We similarly reject the blackmail ofthe bomb
as well as the supposed values of capitalism
or socialism.
Peace is a pre-condition of revolu-
tion.
Within the tragedy which Capital
imposes on life, a collective response is
sketched: in the shadow of destruction, an
ethical exigency of happiness and of life is
affirmed. The mobilization for peace opens
up infmite routes for liberation; the construc-
tive forms in which liberty is today draped
can alone dissolve the power of death be-
hind which the capitalist classes are retrench-
ing. Yes, the revolution continues: the reac-
tionary wave of the '70s has not destroyed
it. It has enriched itself by a sort of irrevers-
ible strategic interiorization which permits it
to be intrinsically articulated with the im-
mense ethical project for peace.
COMMUNISTS Ln Us 103
S
THE NEW ALLIANCE
I. A MOLECULAR METHOD
OF AGGREGATION
The transformations which trouble a
society require a new type of organization.
Leninism or anarchism are no longer any-
thing today but fantasms of defeat, volun-
tarism, and disenchantment, a forced faith or
solitary rebellion, an antithetical form of re-
pression or a simple abstract assertion of sin-
gularity. The organizational choices of the
future movement should be rethought inde-
pendently of the ideological and political ref-
erences to the traditional workers' movement
which led that movement to defeat. The col-
lapse of the two extreme models - leninism
and anarchism - leave altogether open the
question of the machines of struggle which
the movement must make use of in order to
be capable of winning. Their multi-functional
and uniquely characterized articulation of the
singularities which constitute them imply that
104 FEUX GUATFABI & TOM NEGRI
the form of these machines no longer repeats
the centralist project and no longer retains
the illusion of filtering democracy through
centralist structures. One always finds in
pseudo-democratic centralism a traced copy
of statist models. In it, the repressive and
bureaucratic characteristics of the State of
Richelieu, Robespierre, and Rothschild are
replayed and illusorily reversed. For too long,
the revolutionary movement has, through
passivity or refusal, been subject to this ho-
mology. How can the State be destroyed by
an organism which puts up with hegemony,
even on a formal level? But how can such a
task be made a primary concern of an "other"
movement, a different one which is founded
on the self-valorization and the self-produc-
tion of singularities?
Obviously, we have no model of or-
ganizational replacement, but at least we
know what we no longer want. We refuse
everything which repeats the constitutive
models of representative alienation and the
rupture between the levels where political will
is formed and the levels of its execution and
administration. As always happens, in the real
course of a revolutionary process, the new
Covitmnsis Lu Us 105
organizational "proposals" correspond to the
new essence of the social productive force.
And they are its fluidity, the multivalence of
its conceptual references, its permanent ca-
pacity of abstraction, its pragmatic efficiency,
and its power to deterritorialize undermining
every attempt to divide and stratify the forces
inside the organizational process. The for-
mation, execution and administration of po-
litical direction should no longer be sepa-
rated, because that constitutes a repression
of the collective labor force's new character-
istics. The time of Montesquieu and the sepa-
ration of powers is over. The alienated rela-
tionships developed by pseudo-democratic
centralism on the executive and administra-
tive levels, regardless of how it presents it-
self, are in the process of disappearing from
the political horizon of the revolution (from
which Rousseau and the notion of the al-
ienation of individual wills shall also be re-
moved).
But, up to this point, our attempt at
redefinition has only progressed negatively:
more positively, what signifies the organiza-
tion of revolutionary subjectivity?
Let's advance a step at a time and try
106 FELIx GUATrARI & Tor.n NEGRI
to better answer the question.
The supposedly "definitive" argument
of those who uphold the traditional models
of organization consists in affirming that only
one centralized form can prove sufficiently
efficacious in constituting general fronts of
struggle; that is all the more true in capital-
ism's current phase of development, and this
would imply as well an excess of centraliz-
ing force in the organization of the oppressed.
All of this is rather stupid. It would
only be true if society's current submission
to capital was dependent on a rule relating
accumulated value to the quantity of exploi-
tation and if a specific form of command
were necessarily associated with a particular
kind of social production. But isn't this pre-
cisely the sort of measure and the type of re-
lationship that we have left behind? The gen-
eralization of capitalist exploitation is visi-
bly accompanied by a change in the nature
of the repressive functions, such that every
structural regulation tends to be eliminated.
Properly speaking, there is no longer value
to be reappropnated. If the law of value con-
tinued to function, at a level of abstract gen-
erality, one could perhaps once again con-
CorvrrvruMsTs LIKE Us 107
ceive of leninist type organizational projects.
But there is no such thing. Capitalist com-
mand is presently developing in direct and
antagonistic engagement with the free and
proliferating singularities. Whatever rigid and
repressive nets it throws after this wild faun,
it will not succeed in reaching or catching
either its mode of temporalization or its es-
sential riches and goals.
Given these conditions, the task of
organizing new proletarian forms must be
concerned with a plurality of relations within
a multiplicity of singularities - a plurality
focused on collective functions and objec-
tives that escape bureaucratic control and
overcoding, in the sense that the plurality
develops towards optimizing the processes
of involved singularities. What is at stake
here then is a functional multicentrism ca-
pable, on the one hand, of articulating the
different dimensions of social intellection,
and on the other hand of actively neutraliz-
ing the destructive power of capitalist ar-
rangements. This is the first positive charac-
teristic of the new revolutionary subjectivity.
Its cooperative, plural, anti-centralist, anti-
corporatist, anti-racist, anti-sexist dimensions
108 FEUx GUATrARI & Tom NEGRI COMMUNISM LWE US
further the productive capacities of the sin-
gulanties. Only qualified in this way will pro-
letarian struggles be able to reconstitute co-
herent and effective fronts of struggle. These
organizational processes should be conceived
as being essentially dynamic: each singular-
ity is given impetus by objectives which are
not only local but which themselves expand
more and more until they begin to define
points of transsectoral contact nationally and
internationally,
Global projects of society, based in
closed ideologies, thus lose all relevance, all
operative ability. It is no longer a matter of
being founded in abstract syntheses, but in
open processes of analysis, critique, verifi-
cation, and concrete, singular realization.
From a molecular point of view, each at-
tempt at ideological unification is an absurd
and indeed reactionary operation. Desire, on
a social terrain, refuses to allow itself to be
confined to zones of consensus, in the arenas
of ideological legitimation. Why ask a femi-
nist movement to come to a doctrinal or pro-
grammatic accord with ecological movement
groups or with a communitarian experiment
by people of color or with a workers' move-
109
ment, etc? Ideology shatters; it only urn-
fies on the level of appearance. On the con-
trary, what is essential is that each move-
ment shows itself to be capable of unleash-
ng irreversible molecular revolutions and of
linking itself to either limited or unlimited
molar struggles (and only collective analysis
and critique can decide which) on the politi-
cal and syndical terrain of defending the gen-
eral rights ofthe national and/or international
community
The invention and construction of
these new organizational schemas imply the
creation of permanent mechanisms for ana-
lyzing the internal goals of the social subjec-
tivity's own processes of self-production.
This is the sine qua non for guaranteeing a
real questioning of the modes of collective
functioning and for preventing the emergence
of sectarian tendencies.
This seems to us to be the positive
starting-point of a revolutionary method of
organization adequate to the collective sub-
jectivity bearing it: a scientific method in its
mode of analysis, yet open to historical proc-
esses and capable of imagination. "Work in
progress" in the chain links of singularities,
110 FEUx GUAT1'ARI & Torn NEGRI
all oriented toward their self-production and
multiplication. A method, therefore, which
is constitutive of an organization which con-
tinually remakes itself, a method thereby
conjoined to the productive forces which have
made the singularities and their development
the basis of material and spiritual wealth.
II. MACHINES OF STRUGGLE
The analysis has progressed; experi-
ence has accumulated. The method has al-
ready been given some verification. Is it pos-
sible to rethink and begin to realize the or-
ganizational forms of this new revolutionary
subjectivity? To pose this question already
implies a confrontation with the difficulties,
the material modalities, the obstacles, the
enemies of the collective liberation project.
How to conceive the composition and recon-
struction of the movements? How to rebegin
developing each of them in their extensive
articulations? We find ourselves faced with
numerous, heterogeneous topics and with
fluctuating options - the different organ-
ized structures of the movement are not only
jealous of their singularity, but they seem
COMMUNISTS LIKE Us 111
sometimes to open themselves only for de-
fensive struggles, for the reinforcement and
the permanent affirmation of that singular-
ity. In addition, their logics are presented
according to changing and multiple matri-
ces; they're always rearticulating the rhizome
of their different autonomous components in
a different way. It goes without saying that
the problem of ideological agreement or dis-
agreement is no longer posed here in terms
of the usual political logic - neither one be-
longs to the same ideological universe. On
the contrary, the first problem to be resolved
is arranging for the coexistence of multiple
ideological dimensions and developing an
analysis and a confrontation which, without
trying to overcome specific differences, nev-
ertheless tries lo prevent them from degener-
ating into passive and mute divisions. We
therefore imagine a process of recomposi-
tion which takes for granted conflictual vari-
ations within the dynamics of sirigulariza-
lion, respecting each's wealth and responsi-
bility for carrying human productivity.
That said, it is nonetheless necessary
to construct machines of struggle, organiza-
tional devices which are open to these dy-
114 FELIx GUATrARI & TOM NEGRI
but equally a profound modification of their
"propositional context," in particular a re-
definition of the "Rights of Man" guarantee-
ing and encouraging communitarian construc-
tions. Generally speaking, this entails a re-
newal of constitutional mechanisms and of
their capacity to register the conflicts and
social changes which will be posed.
Only that subjectivity engaged in the
singular processes of production can break
the codes and norms of the production of
subjectivity of I.W.C. It is only on this path
that democracy can be reestablished. Juridi-
cal innovation necessarily takes place via the
institutionalization of the real movement. The
only acceptable juridical norm - correspond-
ing in other words to the "instances of jus-
tice" inscribed in groups of people themselves
- is the image-movement of the real. In-
versely, I.W.C. presents us with societies in
which rights are overthrown and in which
the legal codes and constitutions are either
put aside, or function as simple umbrellas
for illegal practices on the part of castes act-
ing in their own interest.
Taking charge of these constitutional
problematics should no longer be overlooked
COMMUNISTS LIKE Us 115
and abandoned, as was the case in the move-
ment for a long time, but belongs properly to
the revolutionary orchestrations of political
will. It is the relation between political will
and the constitution of the State which is in-
verted here. It will be for the first to condi-
tion the second, not the reverse, as conserva-
tive ideologues suggest and as reactionary
practices impose. This reversal does not im-
ply renouncing the existence of a coherent
juridical tradition. On the contrary, it derives
from the will to promote in that tradition a
higher rationality, a greater care for truth and
justice, by integrating within its mechanisms
a capacity for reading the essential mutational
processes.' In sum, the "spirit of the laws"
must acquire a sharp sensibility and intelli-
gence regarding the profound progressive
transformations of the social "market."
It is interesting to note that the recent
apologists ofthe market and its miracle-work-
ing power are outraged opponents of any pro-
motion of this kind of market.
The fact is that at the current level of
the capitalist crisis and the relations of force
between the classes, such political and insti-
tutional free market devices, by facilitating
120 FELix GUATI'ARI & TOM NEGRI
this fact. Machines of revolutionary struggle
are themselves obliged to become disposed
for producing new social realities and new
subjectivities.
We emphasize again that the defini-
tion, the general program of this multidimen-
sional liberation does not belong to these
machines of struggle; it belongs to the
rhizomatic multiplicity of singularity proc-
esses, within each of their production sites,
which they transform, remaking and, should
the case arise, multiplying the power that this
liberation authorizes.
From now on, organizing signifies
first: work on oneself, in as much as one is a
collective singularity; construct and in a per-
manent way re-construct this collectivity in
a multivalent liberation project. Not in refer-
ence to a directing ideology, but within the
articulations of the real. Perpetually recom-
posing subjectivity and praxis is only con-
ceivable in the totally free movement of each
of its components, and in absolute respect of
their own times - time for comprehending
or refusing to comprehend, time to be uni-
fied or to be autonomous, time of identifica-
tion or of the most exacerbated differences.
Cotmusi's LIKE Us 121
Liberation, production, the constitution of
new social arrangements, all arise from dis-
tinct levels - equally important - on the
basis of which the machines of struggle de-
velop. The experiences of community and
solidarity seen by the second half of this cen-
tury illuminate the original paradigms of
those new organizations which we call ma-
chines of struggle. It's necessary now to de-
ploy their free play and their power. It is
clear that Tnly the direct experience of
struggle will determine their contour - to
try to describe in advance what the machines
of struggle of new proletarian subjectivities
will be on a practical level (of desire and
cognition) would run contrary to their essen-
tial mode, which depends on what one no
longer dares to call "the masses."
III. TODAY, NEW LINES
OF ALLIANCE
At the end of a period of defensive
retrenchment - the result of the current re-
pressive wave under the aegis of capitalist
and/or socialist organization - , a special
122 FELIX GUATrARI & ToM NEGRI
form of alliance can and must be realized
between the constitutive categories of the new
proletariat and the most dynamic sectors of
productive society. Distinguishing this alli-
ance is, first, that it can break the corporatist
obstacles to restructuring, which have shown
themselves to be particularly effective
amongst the industrial working classes as well
as in the tertiary service and scientific sec-
tors of social production. The basic revolu-
tionary sequence presently confronting us
concerns the possibilities of making the work-
ing classes, the tertiary production sectors,
and those innumerable components of the
universe of the "non-guaranteed" connect and
interact. The movement will have to take up
this problematic of conjunction with all of
their intelligence and energy. Not because
the working class would remain the deter-
mining element of the revolutionary process.
Neither that the tertiary, intellectual, marginal,
etc. sectors would be the bearers of essential
economic changes. There's nothing to gain
from entertaining such historic misunder-
standings. It is clear that the discourses on
workers' cent ality and hegemony are thor-
oughly defunct and that they cannot serve as
COMMUNISTS LIKE Us 12
a basis for the organization of new political
and productive alliances, or even simply as a
point of reference. Breaking with this sort of
trap, the true question concerns the inven-
tion of a system, not of unification, but of
multivalent engagement of all social forces
which are not only in the process of articu-
lating new subjective forces, but also of
breaking the blocks of capitalist power - in
particular their powers of mass-media sug-
gestion on a considerable portion of the op-
pressed.
It would be fictive and artificial to
expect to find these new affiliations only at
ruptures in the structure, in areas of friction
in the labor market and the corporatist reor-
ganization of different segments of the work-
ing class. Such an attitude would still be part
of the spirit of I.W.C., which is always more
ready to apply repression than to consider
attempts to liberate production. Now, we have
seen that the question of recomposing the
movement's conjunctive unity goes hand in
hand with that of the self-production of eman-
cipation - at once intrinsically singular and
externally offensive in their tendency - by
each of its components. Now self-production
124 FEux GUATFARI & ToM NEG1u
implies effective and unreserved recognition
of everything that really participates in new
types of cooperation and subjectivity, unal-
loyed with the dominant power formations.
The new anti-capitalist alliance will destroy
the corporatist chains of repression and help
replace their viewpoint with those of a col-
lective self-transformation.
Instead of new political alliances, we
could say just as well: new productive coop-
eration.
One always returns to the same point,
that of production - production of useful
goods, production of communication and of
social solidarity, production of aesthetic uni-
verses, production of freedom...
The fact is that the center of gravity
of these productive processes has been dis-
placed toward the molecular web of marginal
and minority concerns. Nevertheless, it's not
a matter of founding a new religion and cre-
ating point by point oppositions between the
whole group of guaranteed workers and the
non-guaranteed workers. On the contrary, it
has to do with finishing with the latter repre-
senting themselves as a heterogeneous en-
semble, excluded in essence from the "true
CofuNIsTs LIKE Us 125
realities" of production, as all the represen-
tational coordinates of capitalism and/or so-
cialism beguile them into thinking... Yet such
a transformation implies as well that numer-
ous sectors of the working class and the privi-
leged categories of the productive proletari-
ats give themselves other "representations"
than those which they possess today and
which, for the most part, are part of the cor-
poratist regime. The molecular revolutions,
the new subjective arrangements, autonomies
and processes of singulanzation are capable
of restoring a revolutionary meaning to the
struggles of the working class and indeed
many sectors of the collective force of labor,
which are now reduced to vegetating in their
sociological stratifications. We believe that
the "proletarian recomposition" can head off
the I.W.C. strategy of "precarization" of the
labor market, and of pitting against each other
those social segments which find themselves
confronting the same market. On a small or
a large scale, the potentials for molecular
revolution appear every time that processes
of detotalization and of deterritorialization en-
croach on the stratification of corporatism.
Now, if it's true that the fundamental
126 FEux GUATFARI & ToM NEGRI
question is the inversion of the corporatist
tendency, it seems equally true that the mo-
tor of that diminution of "social entropy" re-
sides in consistently making a decompart-
mentalization of productive society the revo-
lutionary project. And not only as an ideal
horizon, as a communist ethics, but above
all as a strategic struggle capable of taking
the movement out of its current "failure
neurosis." The most demoralizing situations
and the most negative comparisons of appar-
ent strength can rapidly change as soon as
the precariousness of the current forms of
I.W.C. domination appears in an even more
pronounced way. Even the most "conserva-
tive" segments of the working class are be-
ginning to manifest their unrest, their impa-
tience, and their disgust in regard to those
who are supposed to represent them. The
idea, for so long accepted in good faith, by
virtue of which there existed only one politi-
cal economy as a reference point - that of
I.W.C. - has had its day. The dismantling
of companies, of branches of industries, of
entire regions, the social and ecological costs
of the crisis can no longer be written off as a
necessary reconversion of the system. In fact,
COMMUNISTS LIKE Us 127
it has been clear for some time that this is
not an ordinary crisis, but a radical attempt
to destroy more than half a century's worth
of "acquired advantages" and social victo-
ries of the reformism which corresponded to
the previous forms of capitalism.
Obviously this does not mean that
capitalism is in the process of collapsing on
its own and that we have come, almost de-
spite ourselves, to the eve of the "Great
Night." What is certain is that capitalism and!
or socialism intend to install a regime of fren-
zied "disciplinarization" over the entire
planet, in which each segment of the collec-
tive labor force, each people, each ethnic
group will be forced to submit to permanent
control. In this regard, the guaranteed work-
ers will be placed under the same regime as
the non-guaranteed, and everything will be
nuances, minute non-empirical transitions. No
longer will anyone be able to assume a true
statutory guarantee.
The traditional working classes should
resign themselves to this. But what could the
meaning of their revolt be if they do not un-
derstand that they no longer represent a so-
cial majority - neither numerically, nor as
128 FEux GUATFARI & TOM NEGRI
an ideal value, not even as a produced eco-
nomic value? They are obliged, if they want
to legitimate their rebellion, to socially re-
compose themselves, in alliance with the
immense mass of exploited people, of margi-
nalized people, which includes the large ma-
jority of young, women, immigrants, the sub-
proletariats of the Third World and minori-
ties of every kind. The principle task has be-
come the reunification of the traditional com-
ponents of the class struggle against exploi-
tation with the new liberation movements and
communist projects.
It is on this terrain that the new lines
of alliance will be drawn. We draw a line
through the tradition of the Third Interna-
tional, a black line over its totalitarian and/or
corporatis results. A new revolutionary
movement is in search of itself. It is born
both inside and outside the traditional work
ers' movement; it proliferates and potentially
converges along a front intrinsically unified
by exploitation. It will destroy the repressive
norms of the work-day and of the capitalist
appropriation of the totality of life-time. New
domains of struggle become possible every-
where. But the privileged point, the hot point
CoIuNIsm LIKE Us 129
in the production of new machines of revo-
lutionary struggle resides within the zones of
marginalized subjectivity. And there as well,
it goes without saying, not in and of them-
selves - but because they are inscribed in
the meaning of creative production processes
considered in their evolutionary position, that
is, not arbitrarily isolated within the capital-
ist economic sphere.
The social imaginary can recompose
itself only through radical changes. In this
regard, one should take into account that
marginal phenomena are part of a context
which does not define them as being at the
margin, but which, on the contrary, confers
on them a central place in the capitalist strat-
egy. The marginal subjectivities, in as much
as they are the product and the best "analy-
sers" of command tendencies, are also those
which resist it the best. The physical, bodily,
plastic and external aspects of the liberation
experiences of marginal subjects become
equally the material of a new form o1 ex-
pression and creation. Language and image
here are never ideological but always incar-
nated. Here, more than anywhere else, one
can find the symptoms of the appearance of
 130 FEux GUATI'ARI & TOM NEGRI
a new right to transformation and communi-
tarian life, under the impetus of subjects in
revolt.
New alliances: as a project of the pro-
duction of singularities and as the possibility
of conferring on this project a subversive
social meaning. The self-analytical method
of the forms of social subjectivity becomes
revolutionary substance in the sense that it
I. permits the semiotic understanding and po-
litical amplification of the implosion points
of corporatism and the upheaval of its own
lines of alliance. The common consciousness
has already perceived this process of con-
junction; the revolutionary imagination has
begun to apprehend it; what remains is to
make it the basis of the constitution of the
" future movement.
COMMUNISTS LIKE UsIii
6
THINK ANDLLIVE
IN ANOTHER WAY.,
PROPOSITIONS
Resentment, empty repetition and sec-
tarianism are the modalities by which we live
the betrayed hopes of the traditional work-
ers' movement. For all that we do not re-
nounce the history of struggles; on the con-
trary, we celebrate it because it is an integral
part of our mental coordinates and sensibil-
ity. If we are dwarves on the shoulders of
giants, we assume the benefits as much as
the deplorable aspects of their heritage. At
any rate, we want to move forward. Reunit-
ing with the human roots of communism, we
want to return to the sources of hope, that is,
to a "being-for," to a collective intentional-
ity, turned toward doing rather than toward a
"being against," secured to impotent
catchphrases of resentment. It is in real his-
tory that we intend to explore and experi-
ence the many realms of possibility which
132 FEux GUATrARI & ToM NEGRI
we call forth from everywhere. Let a thou-
sand flowers bloom on the terrains which
attempt to undermine capitalist destruction.
Let a thousand machines of life, art, solidar-
ity, and action sweep away the stupid and
sclerotic arrogance of the old organizations!
What does it matter if the movement trips
over its own immaturity, over its "sponta-
neism" - its power of expression will ulti-
mately only be reinforced. Without even
being aware of it, despite the cacophony of
the molecular movements which sustain it,
an organizational crystalization is opening,
oriented in the direction of new collective
subjectivities. "Let a thousand flowers blos-
som, a thousand machines of struggle and of
life," is not an organizational slogan and even
less an enlightened prediction, but an ana-
lytic key to the new revolutionary subjectiv-
ity, a given on the basis of which can be
grasped the social characteristics and dimen-
sions of the singularities of productive labor.
It is through an analysis of the real that they
will be recomposed and will multiply as a
subversive and innovative presence. The en-
emy has been incarnated in current forms of
social command, through the elimination of
COMMUNISTS Luu Us 133
differences and the imposition of a reductive
logic of domination. Bringing to light the
hegemony of singularization processes on the
horizon of social production constitutes to-
day the specific hallmark of communist po-
litical struggle.
The development, defense and expres-
sion of changing productive subjectivities, of
dissident singularities, and of new proletar-
ian temperments has become, in some re-
spects, the primary content and task of the
movement. That can take the form of the
struggle on the welfare front, for the estab-
lishment of a guaranteed egalitarian income,
against poverty in all its forms, for the de-
fense and enlargement of alternative rights,
and against the mechanisms of corporatist
division... If one wants, one will find there
as well the tradition of struggles against rent,
and this such that it is not only fundamental,
real, and financial, but that it is essentially
undergirded by the articulations of capitalist
command; i.e. a political rent, a rent reflect-
ing position in the hierarchy of corporatist
strata. New subjective components of pro-
duction and revolution will find their first
intervention opportunity at this level, rede-
134 FELIx GUATTARI & Tom NEGRI COMMUNISTS LIKE Us 135

The development of science and technology

fining it in a positive mode as a liberation
and their massive incorporation in this trans-
struggle against corporatist slavery and reac-
formation program are necessary, but not suf-
tionary structures of production and as af-
ficient, conditions. No transformation is con-
firming the processes of singularity as an es-
ceivable unless the entire field of productive
sential spring of social production.
labor is confronted with large movements of
This recomposition of the revolution-
collective experimentation which break those
ary movement implies, of course, immense
efforts of courage, patience, and above all, conceptions which relate to profit-centered
capitalist accumulation.
intelligence. But what progress has already
It is in this direction that the expan-
been made compared to preceding periods of
sion power of the collective labor force
struggle - which were indefatigable and of- should be grasped. Thus a double movement
ten despairing - by the first groups con-
will be established, like that of the human
scious of this problematic, who only rarely
heart, between the diastole of the expansive
succeeded in opening breaches in the union
force of social production and the systole of
ghetto or in the political monopoly of the radical innovation and rearrangement of the
supposed labor parties! Here as well, life time
work day. The movement of the social pro-
must be imposed on production time. At this
letariat and new collective subjectivities must
crossroads the second task of the revolution-
lay siege to the corporations, viz. the stakes
ary communist movement will be posed: con-
regarding legislation governing the the length
sciously organizing the collective labor force of the work day, and impose its redefinitions
independently of the capitalist and/or social-
and its permanent experimentation. They
ist structures, that is, of everything which
must impose not only a productive renewal,
touches on the production and reproduction
but also new ways of imagining and of study-
of the mode of life. One thing, an effect, is
to reveal new social productive forces and ing production.
Think, live, experiment, and struggle
another is to organize them outside and
in another way: such will be the motto of a
against capitalist and/or socialist structures.
116 FELIX GUATrAPJ & TONI NEGifi
COMMUNISTS LIKE Us 117

and inciting collective liberty's potential, tend to essentially deepen the singularity of
would destroy, even annul the conditions of the collective situation from which they ema-
the liberal-bourgeois market of exploitation. nate, without in any way damaging their op-
It is thus clear that, while we contest
positional, revolutionary relation with the
the State's pretensions to lord over social State.
conflict in a contractual manner (a practice
which is invariably a source of totalitarian-
ism), we do not for all that speak for those
falsely naive attempts to seize the processes
of social singularization, only pretending to
acknowledge them under the aegis of a cor-
porate project (which they try then to inte-
grate into what is pompously called the "so-
cial economy." The pseudo-Proudhonian ide-
ology cloaking certain of these attempts has
no other goal than to render them captive to
an expanded capitalist market.) Corporatism,
however it presents itself, should be over-
turned; it can only generate ersatz, false so-
lutions to the problematics of new subjec-
tivities. All statist manipulations, the ingrati-
ating as well as the disgraceful, must be re-
lentlessly combatted. Statism and corpora-
tism are two faces of the same obstacle to
the development of autonomies and of sin-
gularities. We repeat: the machines of strug-
gle, carried by new proletarian subjectivities,
136 FEUx GUATrARI & ToNI NEGRI
COMMUNISTS LIKE Us 13

working class which can no longer perceive ers, which has overcoded, from the 70s until
itself as "self-sufficient" and which has eve-
today, all international relations. Breaking the
rything to win by renouncing its arrogant relation of domination laboriously established
myths of social centrality. As soon as one between capitalism and socialism, and radi-
has finished with this sort of mystification, - especially the
cally reversing the alliances
which ultimately has only profited the capi-
european ones - in the direction of the
talist and/or socialist power formations, one
North-South axis, against the East-West axis,
will discover the great significance of the
constitutes an essential foundation for recom-
new lines of alliance which tie together the
posing the intellectual and working class pro-
multiform and multivalent social stages at
letariat in the advanced capitalist countries.
the heart of of our era's productive forces. It
A basis of social production which will win
is time that communism's imagination raise
its independence against hierarchical oppres-
itself to the height of the changing waves
sion and the command of the great powers; a
which are in the process of submerging the
basis which only has meaning if it begins
old dominant "realities."
with a collective will to create alternative
Now it is necessary to introduce cer-
flows and structures to those of the East-
tain considerations regarding a first "diagram-
West relation.
matic proposition" integrating the definitions
We are not fallbacks to "Third World-
of the perspectives just introduced. It's only
ism"; we do not pretend to transform it by
too evident that every effort at taking control
way of a traditional "insurrectionism"; nei-
of the length of the work day, by the move-
ther for all that do we believe in its inde-
ment of the new subjectivities, will be illu-
pendent capacity for development and "re-
sory if it does not attack frontally the net-
demption" - at least in the current capitalist
work of command put in place by I.W.C. To
context. None of the successful revolutions
tackle this network means putting in ques-
in the developed countries has succeeded in
tion the East-West relation, to derail the
transforming in a lasting way the structures
mechanism integrating the two super-pow-
of the State. It is not likely that those of the
118 FEux GUATrARI & ToM NEGRI
This is only a paradox if one misap-
prehends the movement's liberating goals
and, especially, the interest of each of its
components in the disappearance of tech-
niques of power and group manipulations
inherent in traditional systems of representa-
tion "in the name of," supposedly, the gen-
eral will. We have had our account of Me-
nenius Agrippa and his apologists! Thus the
machines of struggle will develop their pro-
ductive activities and political action in di-
rect contact with, and the same texture as the
distinct contexts within which they are
formed. They will engage in production and
reproduction simultaneously. Within produc-
tion, in order to prepare society's capacity
for autonomous and communist management
of human activities, and in order to construct
a new type of economy founded on collec-
tive arrangements which connect different
modalities of semiotic and machinic prac-
tice. And, within the whole of society, in
order to set up the reproduction and organi-
zation of the distribution and functions of
work time, self-managed and as-free-as-pos-
sible. Thus, a promotion of the collective as
much as of initiative, of creation and of mdi-
Co1MuN1srs LIKE Us 119
vidual responsibility. As we know, the neo-
liberal sycophants love to return to the my-
thologies of the boss, as the sole guarantor
of the i Jonal ordering of complex produc-
tive procce', as the only possible agent of
the "dynamization" of the force of labor,
etc .... At the same time, they try to discredit
self-management as being synonymous with
"mediocracy," (impossible to apply on a large
scale, etc.). All their reasoning proceeds from
a total misapprehension of the means of col-
lective semiotization which are now at work
in all the significant arenas of science and
technology. A certain conception of tree-like
hierarchies and oppressive disciplines has
undoubtedly become passé. It no longer has
to do with a simple question of taste or of
democratic "prejudice." The extensive ar-
rangement, in rhizome, of machinic compo-
nents, of informational components, and of
decision-making components has become an
absolute necessity, if production is to keep
up, to further society, science, . in sum,
human life on this planet. After a ft 'centu-
ries of socialist and/or capitalist domii ation,
production and society have become one and
the same thing. There is no turning-back from
112 FELIx GUATrARI & TOM NEGRI
namics and to this functional multicentrism.
These machines of struggle will be all the
more effective in that their field of action
will be limited and in that they will establish
for themselves the fundamental goal of per-
fecting the singularization processes.
Such modes of organizational crys-
talization appeared in North America in the
'60s, at the time of the different "campaigns"
of the movement. The same thing in Ger-
many in the '70s, where the development of
the alternative movement revealed the exis-
tence of lines of differentiation going in the
direction of both maximizing singularization
and in materially recomposing the possibili-
ties of struggle. An open method, therefore,
that takes substance from its openness to en-
gender an open organization.
It frequently happens - as much in
Arab, Slavic, Latin American as in Anglo-
Saxon countries - that this experimentation
with new forms of organization develops
from within a religious imaginary. Undoubt-
edly, one must distinguish between religious
motivations which attach to an act of libera-
tion and those which are reterritorialized
around theological alienation.
CoMvEuMsTs Lna Us 113
It is a fact that in a world whose sole
"burrs" can only be non-significant ruptures,
the reconquest of the value of witness, of
personal engagement, of singular resistance,
and of basic solidarity has become an essen-
tial motor of transformation. In order to con-
stitute a machine of struggle, the movements
are obliged to assume, as completely as pos-
sible, a contradictory relation between sin-
gularity and capitalist society, between eth-
ics and politics. And this is scarcely con-
ceivable except on the condition that the
forms of militancy are totally reinvented. We
should lead the analysis and critique of mili-
tancy and of previous experiences, when they
make us sad, when they become historically
tarnished, because they constitute obstacles
to a liberating praxis. But it strikes us as
impossible that a new open method of or-
ganization could be founded without con-
cretely redefining a new militancy - what-
ever the breadth of its motivations. That is, a
certain social crystalization of desire and of
generosity runs through all singularities.
One can expect from this way of con-
ceiving things not only the birth of new or-
ganizations, changed machines of struggle,
 COMMUNISTS LIIE Us 139
138 FEUx GUArFARI & ToM NEGR[

Third World will do any better. No, it is rather
toward revolutionary cooperation and aggre-
gation of forces among the intellectual and
working proletariat of the North with the great
mass of the proletariat of the South that it is
necessary to turn to fulfill this historic task.
All of this may seem utopian, even extrava-
gant, because today we, the workers and in-
tellectuals of the countries of the North, are
slaves of corporatist politics, of segmentary
divisions, of the logic of profit, of blocking
and extermination operations, of the fear of
nuclear war, as they are imposed on us and
with which we make ourselves accomplices.
Our liberation requires creating a project and
a practice which unifies, in the same revolu-
tionary will, the intellectual forces and the
proletariats of the North and of the South.
As the union of processes of singu-
larity advances toward the project of rein-
venting communism, the problem of power
will be posed with increasing acuity; it re-
mains at the heart of the antagonism between
proletarian components and the capitalist and!
or socialist State. The traditional workers'
movement wanted to respond to this ques-
tion in a simple and radical way through the
conquest of State power, then through the
progressive disappearance of the State. Eve-
rything was supposed to follow from itself.
One would oppose destruction with destruc-
tion and terror with terror. It would be use-
less today to provide an epilogue regarding
the fictive and mystifying character of this
dialectic or to underline the scandalous ref-
erence by holders of this doctrine to the he-
roic experience of the Paris Commune.
The first basic task of the revolution-
ary communist movement consists in having
done with this sort of conception and in af-
firming the movement's radical separation not
only from the State which it directly con-
fronts but also, more fundamentally, from the
very model of the capitalist State and all its
successors, replacements, derived forms, and
assorted functions in all the wheels of the
socius, at all levels of subjectivity. Thus, to
the struggles around welfare, against the or-
ganization of productive labor and of labor's
social time, and to communitarian initiatives
in this domain, should be added questioning
the State as the determinant of different forms
of oppression, the machine for overdetermin-
ing social relations, in order to reduce, block,
140 FEUx GUATFART & Tom NEGRI
and radically subjugate them, under the threat
of its forces of death and destruction.
This question leads us to formulate a
second diagrammatic proposition of commu-
nism and liberation: it concerns the urgency
of reterritorializing political practice. Con-
fronting the State today means fighting
against this particular formation of the State,
which is entirely integrated into I.W.C.
After Yalta, political relations were
further emptied of their territorial legitimacy
and drifted toward levels impossible to at-
tain. Communism represents tendential de-
struction of those mechanisms which make
of money and other abstract equivalents the
only territories of man. This does not imply
nostalgia for "native lands," the dream of a
return to primitive civilizations or to the sup-
posed communism of the "good savage." It
is not a question of denying the levels of
abstraction which the deterritorialized proc-
esses of production made man conquer.
What is contested by communism are
all types of conservative, degrading, oppres-
sive reterritorialization imposed by the capi-
talist and/or socialist State, with its adminis-
trative functions, institutional organs, its col-
COMMUNISTS LIKE Us 141
lective means of normalization and block-
age, its media, etc .... The reterritorialization
induced by communist practice is of an en-
tirely different nature; it does not pretend to
return to a natural or universal origin; it is
not a circular revolution; rather it allows an
"ungluing" of the dominant realities and sig-
nifications, by creating conditions which per-
mit people to "make their territory," to con-
quer their individual and collective destiny
within the most deterritorialized flows.
(In this regard, one is led to distin-
guish very concretely: the movements of na-
tionalist reterritorialization - Basque, Pal-
estinian, Kurdish... - which assume, to a
certain extent, the great deterritorialized flows
of Third World struggles and immigrant pro-
letariats, and the movements of reactionary
nationalist reterritorialization.)
Our problem is to reconquer the corn-
munitarian spaces of liberty, dialog and de-
sire. A certain number of them are starting
to proliferate in different countries of Eu-
rope. But it is necessary to construct, against
the pseudo-reterritorializations of I.W.C.
(example: the "decentralization" of France,
or of the Common Market), a great move-
142 FEUx GUATFARI & ToM NEGRI
ment of reterritorializing bodies and minds:
Europe must be reinvented as a reterritoriali-
zation of politics and as a foundation for re-
versing the alliances of the North-South axis.
The third task of the revolutionary
communist movement is thus also to "disar-
ticulate" and dismantle the repressive func-
tions of the State and its specialized appara-
tuses. This is the sole terrain on which new
collective subjects confront the initiatives of
the State, and only in the sense that the latter
dispatches its "teutonic cavaliers" over those
areas liberated by the revolutionary arrange-
ments. Forces of love and humor should be
put to work here so that they are not abol-
ished, as is usually the case, in the mortally
abstract and symbolic lunar image of their
capitalist adversary! Repression is first and
foremost the eradication and perversion of
the singular. It's necessary to combat it within
real life relations of force; it's also necessary
to get rid of it in the registers of intelligence,
imagination, and of collective sensitivity and
happiness. Everywhere it's necessary to ex-
tract, including from oneself, the powers of
implosion and despair which empty reality
and history of their substance.
Co1uNTsTs LIKE Us 143
The State, for its part, can live out its
days in the isolation and encirclement re-
served for it by a reconstructed civil society!
But if it appears about to come out of its
"retreat" and to reconquer our spaces of free-
dom, then we will respond by submerging it
within a new kind of general mobilization,
of multiform subversive alliances. Until it
dies smothered in its own fury.
The fourth task: Here we are inevita-
bly returning to the anti-nuclear struggle and
to the struggle for peace. Only, now it is in
relation to a paradigm which brings to light
the catastrophic implications of science's po-
sition in relation to the State, a position which
presupposes a dissociation between the "le-
gitimacy" of power and the goal of peace. It
is truly a sinister mockery that States accu-
mulate thousands of nuclear warheads in the
name of their responsibility to guarantee
peace and international order although it is
evident that such an accumulation can only
guarantee destruction and death. But this ul-
timate "ethical" legitimation of the State, to
which reaction attaches itself as to a ram-
part, is also in the process of collapsing, and
not only on a theoretical level, but also in
144 FEux GUATFARI & TOM NEGRI
the consciousness of those who know or sus-
pect that collective production, freedom, and
peace are in their proper place fundamen-
tally irreducible to power.
Prevent the catastrophe of which the
State is the bearer while revealing the extent
to which that catastrophe is essential to the
State. It remains true that "capitalism carries
war as clouds carry storms." But, in a man-
ner different than in the past, through other
means and on a horizon of horror which at
this point escapes all possible imagination,
this perspective of the final holocaust has, in
effect, beccme the basis of a veritable world
civil war conducted by capitalist power and
constituted by a thousand permanently erupt-
ing, pulverizing wars against social emanci-
pation struggles and molecular revolutions.
Nevertheless, in this domain, as in no other,
nothing is fated. Not all the victories and
defeats of the movement's new lines of alli-
ance are inscribed in a mechanistic causality
or a supposed dialectic of history. Everything
is to be redone, everything is constantly to
be reconsidered. And it's good that it is so.
The State is only a cold monster, a vampire
in interminable agony which derives vitality
Co1uNIs1s Lnu Us 14.
only from those who abandon themselves to
its simulacra.
In '68, no one could imagine that war
would so quickly become such a close and
encroaching horizon. Today, war is no longer
a prospect: it has become the permanent
frame of our lives.
The third great imperialist war has
already begun. A war no doubt grows old
after thirty years, like the Thirty Years War,
and no one recognizes it any longer, even
though it has become the daily bread of "cer-
tain" among the press. Yet such has resulted
from capitalism's reorganization and its furi-
ous assaults against the world proletariats.
The third diagrammatic proposition of com-
munism and liberation consists in becoming
aware of this situation and assuming the prob-
lematic of peace as fundamental to the proc-
ess of reversing alliances along the North-
South axis. Less than ever, peace is not an
empty slogan; a formula of "good con-
science"; a vague aspiration.
Peace is the alpha and omega of the
revolutionary program. The anguish of war
sticks to our skin, pollutes our days and
nights. Many people take refuge in a neutral-
146 FELIx GUArrA1U & ToM NEGRI
ist politics. But even this unconsciousness
generates anguish. Communism will tear men
and women away from the stupidity pro-
grammed by I.W.C. and make them face the
reality of this violence and death, which the
human species can conquer if it succeeds in
conjugating its singular potentials of love and
of reason.
And finally, to these alliances of pro-
ductive organization and liberated collective
subjectivities should be added a fifth dimen-
sion - of which we have already spoken
amply - that of organization itself. The time
has come to move from sparse resistance to
constituting determinate fronts and machines
of struggle which, in order to be effective,
will lose nothing of their richness, their com-
plexity, of the multivalent desires that they
bear. It belongs to us to work for this transi-
tion.
To sum up: five tasks await the move-
ments of the future: the concrete redefinition
of the work force; taking control over and
liberating the time of the work day; a perma-
nent struggle against the repressive functions
of the State; constructing peace and organiz-
ing machines of struggle capable of assum-
COMMUNISTS Ln Us 14?
ing these tasks.
These five tasks are made "diagram-
matic" by three propositions: contribute to
reorienting the lines of proletarian alliance
along a North-South axis; conquer and in-
vent new territories of desire and of political
action, radically separated from the State and
from I.W.C.; fight against war and work at
constructing. the proletariat's revolutionary
movement for peace.
We are still far from emerging from
the storm; everything suggests that the end
of the "leaden years" will still be marked by
difficult tests; but it is with lucidity, and with-
out any messianism, that we envisage the re-
construction ofa movement of revolution and
liberation, more effective, more intelligent,
more human, more happy than it has ever
been.*
Rome, Rebibbia Prison I Paris
1983-84
 149

POSTSCRIPT, 1990
Toni Negri

"Rome, Rebibbia Prison/Paris, 1983-

1984": this chronological note which con-
cludes our French text, published in 1985,
has nothing contrived about it. The dialogue
between the two authors did not come to a
halt during the long years in which one of
them was imprisoned. In fact in the last year
of that imprisonment we had decided to col-
laborate on a work that would deal with the
continuity of the communist political pro-
gram, beyond the repression and in spite of
its effects. When one of us left'prison and
went into exile, the possibility arose'in 1984
to actually collaborate on such a project.
That is how this text was born. The
continuity of the communist program, the
memory of our struggles, and a political and
ethical fidelity to the revolutionary option all
contributed to renew our friendship and our
discussions. It is scarcely necessary to recall
 COMMUNISTS LIKE Us 153
152 FELIx GUATI'ARI & ToM NEGRI

events, certain elements have been contra-

live and to produce revolutionary subjectiv-
dicted, not by the historical developments,
ity.
but by the intensity - foreseen - which
If this was our basic message, it was
those developments assumed. Let us review
nevertheless not irrelevant how we went
some of these elements.
about expressing and objectifying our desire.
Re-reading ourselves today we can recog- a. We recognized very clearly that
nize that the themes of the analysis and the
work, as it became more and more abstract,
program of action proposed were and still
mobile, and socially diffused, required new
remain essentially sound. In other words,
forms of recomposition. We began to fol-
the way we described the lines of develop-
low the processes involved in producing the
ment of the mode of production, the system
of domination, and the crisis in both - and, subjectivity which the new organization of
on the other side, the prospects we outlined capitalist production entailed. But we should
have gone more deeply and realized that this
for the development of an alternative organi-
zation, as well as our judgments on the proc- newly produced subjectivity was locked in
an insuperable contradiction, for social co-
esses of constituting a new subject, on that
operation was more and more violently in
subject's productive qualities, and on the cul-
tural system that would constitute the sub- opposition to the structures of capitalist con-
trol. The contradiction was especially appar-
ject - all of these elements of our analysis
ent in the case of intellectual work, which is
had been articulated in a way that captured
non-material and which, as it became the
the real trends. If we had made mistakes,
center of production, manifested its irrecon-
they were errors of incompleteness - we
cilable difference with the capitalist norm.
hadn't risked pursuing the tendencies far
We ought to have noted more clearly the
enough, and we hadn't risked making our central importance of the struggles within the
imagination revolutionary enough. schools, throughout the educational system,
In brief: while the greater part of our
in the meanders of social mobility, in the
analysis has been confirmed by subsequent
 154 FEUx GUATI'ARI & TOM NEGRI
Couv1uNism LIKE Us 155,

places where the labor force is formed; and

we also ought to have developed a wider
c. We should have better defined the
analysis of the processes of organization and
revolt which were just beginning to surface scope of the ecological struggle, a movement
which appeared consistent with the program
in those areas.
of proletarian liberation. We ought to have
b. There was certainly no acknowledged not only the necessity of de-
mistaking
the new dimension assumed by communica- fending nature against the menace of destruc-
tion and the imminent apocalypse that hangs
tions, which functioned as an instrument and
over it, but also the urgency of constructing
promoter of deterritorialization, directed to-
new systems and conditions for re-produc-
ward intellectual usurpation and moral im-
ing the human species, as well as defining
poverishment. And it was no paradox if ex-
the modes and timetables for revolutionary
actly here, in this area where capitalist domi-
nation was so strong, one could detect mecha- action in this direction. It is easy to see that
our text was written before Chernobyl.
nisms for recomposing the subject and giv-
ing a new territorialization to desire. But
d. And now we must take up the point
while our work stopped at the point of iden-
most deserving of criticism and self-censure.
tifying the possibility of such a rebellion, we In defining Integrated World capitalism, we
should have persisted in our analysis, tracing
did not sufficiently measure the intensity of
out the new moments of reconstruction, of
the process set in motion by the direct par-
recomposition of the subject. This latter proc-
ess needs to be seen not in the context of ticipation of the Soviet Union in that mecha-
nism. Of course all through our pamphlet we
some home-made operation, or some unique
had insisted on the identity of the exploita-
experiment. We are not talking about some
tion taking place in capitalist countries and
utopia to come, but about a real formative
that taking place in socialist countries. Now
power, a material force for political and so-
the world market's definitive overcoming of
cial reconstruction.
the Stalinist pressure only confirms this ob-
150 FEUX GUAUAIU & TOM NEGRI
CoMMuNIsTs
how dreary that period was. In Italy, the so-
called "years of lead" never seemed to end,
and with them there had developed a leaden
political and social climate; in France, the
social democrats, having reached power with
a program of profound social renewal, had
by then transformed their politics and were
carrying out the sinister business of restruc-
turing which had been entrusted to them by
capital; within the Atlantic alliance the reac-
tionary adventures of Reagan and Thatcher
had reached their apex; and in the USSR (as
we only now can perceive) what were to be
the very last - though still ferocious -
remnants of Stalinism still held power.
Nothing seemed to threaten this hor-
rible immobility - except for a bit of back-
ground noise, an occasional "limited" or
"local" war, such as the "little" bloodbath
between Iran and Iraq, the re-emergence of
collective cannibalism in Southeast Asia, and
the fascism and "apartheid" of Latin Amer-
ica and south Africa. We were living in a
period of permanent counter-revolution. The
new movements that would become impor-
tant in the second half of the 1980s - move-
ments based on mobility and organization,
LIKE Us 151
anti-racist movements, movements rich in
non-material desires - all of these had not
yet appeared on the horizon. Instead those
movements that had persisted through the
1970s lingered on, pathetic, enfeebled, and
desperate.
Exactly against this background we
decided to write once more of revolution,
renewing a discourse of hope.
Ours was a discourse of hope, and a
breaking away in a positive sense. But no
one, not even friends, seemed to understand
- our position was strange, improvised, out
of fashion. We were not concerned with these
objections, however, because we were inter-
ested in only one thing: reconstituting a nu-
cleus, however small, of militancy and of
subjectivity-in-progress. This meant resisting
the political defeat of the 1970s, especially
where it had been followed, on the capitalist
side, with the production of an ideology of
repentance, betrayal and self-pity, seasoned
with the new, "weak" values of ethical cyni-
cism, political relativism, and monetary real-
ism.
Playing the card of "naiveté,' we
wanted to affirm that it was still possible to
 FEux GUATI'ARI & ToM NEGRI
156
servation. But the acceleration of the proc-
esses of integration taking place in the last
five years and the effects thereof cannot be
underestimated. Very acute contradictions are
being created within each of the two blocs as
well as in the relationship between East and
West. The problem of peace can be put in
much less utopian terms today than when we
composed our pamphlet. But precisely for
that reason, the achievement and the mainte-
nance of peace become a positive force for
reopening the processes of liberation, revolt,
and radical transformation.
e. Certainly our book did not under-
estimate the question of North-South rela-
tions. But we were far too optimistic. We
believed that in the face of the disastrous
decline in the prospects of the Southern na-
tions, some kind of new alliance with the
North would inevitably be laid out. Nothing
of the sort occurred, and indeed the situation
has become much worse. Entire continents
are adrift without a compass and there has
not been a single political initiative worthy
of the name which has been offered to com-
bat the enormous problems posed by this dis-
CoMMUMSTS Lua Us 157
aster. Benefit concerts and acts of state-spon-
sored charity have multiplied - and at the
same time the isolation and the lack of news
from these poorest countries have become
more ominous.
It is with desperation and anguished
impotence that we look upon that massacre
of innocents, that unending genocide... It is
with anger that we contemplate these things.
We could continue analyzing the de-
fects of our discourse, while still affirming
its substantial validity. But to what end? The
evidence that allows us to still believe today
that communism has never been nearer to
fruition derives not from our own words but
from the radical change of direction taken
by history in the last four or five years. What
we once believed in as a utopia now seems
common sense. The age of the Reagan
counter-revolution and the very gloomy pe-
riod of neo-liberal power now seem defini-
tively superseded. We knew that they would
not last long, and we never ceased laughing
at their "new philosophers" and being nause-
ated by those who had "repented." Never-
theless, we are surprised to see how fragile
158 FELIx GUATrARI & ToM NEGRI
such arrogance really was. The grand decla-
rations abOut neo-liberalism, about a new so-
cial contract, about a new Enlightenment are
today obviously charades - as they were in
the past. In the past, however, it took cour-
age to say so; nowadays this truth seems ba-
nal.
But we are not so much interested in
talking as in being. Being, and thus organiz-
ing. Organizing, and hence having the possi-
bility of overthrowing the sense of produc-
tion which capital, for the sake of profit, en-
forces within our information-oriented social
fabric. Overthrowing that sense, subverting
it... For that we look to praxis. And praxis,
today, is found in the East bloc.
Before speaking of praxis, a brief
clarification of terminology is in order. People
say that communism is dead. We think this
affirmation is inexact, and that it is socialism
which is moribund. How are these two terms
distinguished? For the old-line militant, the
distinction between socialism and commu-
nism was obvious: socialism was that politi-
cal-economic order in which "to each was
given according to his work"; whereas corn-
COMMUNISTS LIKE Us 159
munism was that system in which "to each
was given according to his needs." Social-
ism and communism represented two differ-
ent stages of the revolutionary process, the
first being characterized by the socialization
of the means of production and by the politi-
cal administration of this transition, the sec-
ond characterized by the extinction of the
state and by the spontaneous management of
both the economy and power.
If this distinction was clear to the old-
line communist militants, today, in the era of
a collapse of "real socialism," it has been
obliterated, and communism and socialism
are easily confused. They are confused via a
hostile, wholesale reduction performed by the
adversaries of socialism, who have under-
taken a brutal liquidation of all things social-
ist that were created in the world after 1917,
whether in Eastern Europe or in the Third
World. Of course these all too easy liquida-
tions take sustenance from favorable condi-
tions: in the socialist states of Eastern Eu-
rope during the last forty years the sole meth-
ods of legitimizing power have been the mys-
tification of ideology, frauds perpetrated by
the bureaucracy, and cynicism in dealing with
160 FELIx GUATTARI & ToNI NEGRI
theory - all of which, predictably enough,
have produced symptoms of radical refusal
and disgust. How could the "radiant future"
promised by communism have avoided being
discredited in societies that were socialist in
name only, societies that were in fact bu-
reaucratic organizations, in which utopia was
achieved by hiding realities?
Having said this, let us return to the
concepts themselves and their history, not-
ing that, in all probability, they are not re-
ducible to the guises in which they appear in
present-day polemics, nor subject to the cur-
rent wholesale dismissals. Indeed for about
a century and a half, that is, from the foun-
dation of the "League of Communists" which
looked to Marx for leadership in the middle
of the last century, communism has been the
central political ideology for the modern age.
In opposition to the old utopias, it is based
on a real, forward-looking analysis of the
mechanism of development of capitalism
from the worker's point of view. Taking a
scientific look at the social-economic dynam-
ics of the capitalist system as it lives and
grows solely by exploiting the labor force,
the party of the working class can define the
COMMUNISTS LIKE Us 161
strategies and tactics for the communist fu-
ture, setting as its objectives the destruction
of the mechanism of capitalist accumulation
and the conquest of political power. Marx
brings us up to this point, offering a formi-
dable scientific apparatus for dealing with
this project.
The subsequent transfer of Marx's
theoretical analysis to the problem of revolu-
tionary mobilization within the new context
of European capitalism at the beginning of a
century marked by a radical instability in the
various political and social systems, is the
task which Lenin takes up and which leads
him to formulate the organizational principles
of a new kind of party, the "Bolshevik Com-
munist Party." This party is the vanguard of
the working class which, having broken with
the mere economic demands of the unions,
the mere opportunistic spontaneity of the an-
archists, and the legalistic version of the class
struggle practiced by the parties of the Sec-
ond International, has shaped itself into a dis-
ciplined, flexible instrument specifically
adapted for seizing power and installing the
dictatorship of the proletariat. The objective
of this dictatorship is the institution of so-
162 FELIx GUATFARI & Tor.u NEGRJ
cialism, or the nationalization of the means
of production and a centralization of plan-
ning. But all of this was supposed to take
place within a radical process of democratic
participation, within a transitional period that
would create conditions of economic growth
for everyone and at the same time would
dissolve the central power of the state and
the law, bestowing both wealth and freedom
on the citizens. What an illusion, and what
disappointments!
The Leninist conceptions of the party
and the revolutionary transition were con-
tested within the left wing of the workers'
movement by Rosa Luxemburg, both at the
time of the 1905 uprising and after the 1917
revolution. For her, organization meant the
permanent refusal, exactly in the workplace,
of any mediation of workers' self-expression
or the class struggle through the agency of
the unions or the reformist party; her idea of
organization coincided with the rising levels
of worker spontaneity and with the specific
political institutions generated by such spon-
taneity, including the "soviets" in Russia in
1905 and 1917, and the "workers' councils"
in Germany in 1918-1919. Lenin, on the other
COMMUNISTS LIKE Us 163
hand, held that the workers' own self-directed
organization for struggle could not prefigure
the party, since a revolutionary political di-
rectorate, standing outside the individual
struggles, would have to supervise all the
various expressions of spontaneity in order
to assure the fundamental goal of a dictator-
ship of the proletariat.
Is it this contradiction between Lux-
emburg and Lenin - between an idea of
communism as a democracy constituted by
masses in struggle, or, on the other hand, as
a dictatorship of the proletariat - that gives
rise to the crisis in the management of so-
cialist power once the insurrection has been
victorious and power has been seized? Many
communists (and there are still 'many of them
in the world) think so, and it is very prob-
able that as the subversive movement revives
in the coming decades (for it is evident that
it will revive) It will have to reconsider these
issues.
But other problems can also become
central in the discussions motivated by the
present crisis of communism and the collapse
of "real socialism." In particular, it is inter-
esting to follow developments in Russia in
164 FEUx GUATrARI & TOM NEolu
the wake of the dilemma that surfaced after
Lenin's death. At that point the Soviet politi-
cal debate centered on the two alternatives
of a "permanent revolution," or, on the other
hand, "socialism in a single country." These
alternatives were discussed in terms of their
relationship to Leninism and to the October
revolution. Leon Trotsky, an ardent defender
of the first thesis as a means of inoculating
the revolution against the bureaucratization
of the state and the party, was defeated by
those who, embracing the second alternative,
believed that the unequal development of
capitalist countries and the exceptional na-
ture of a proletarian victory at the weak link
in the imperialist chain had rendered the con-
struction of socialism in a single country an
obligatory course of action. Among the ad-
vocates of the second thesis Stalin soon
emerged as the merciless executor of an ex-
treme centralization of the party and an
enormous concentration of power in the ad-
ministrative-repressive apparatus. Thus the
distance between Marx's theory of a class
struggle against the capitalist system and the
actual practice in the construction of social-
ism widencd vertiginously. Paradoxically,
Co11sruNIs1s LIKE Us 165
communism - defined by Marx as "the real
movement which abolishes the present state
of affairs" - became the productive activity
which created at whatever cost the material
bases of an industrial society that was locked
in a competition with the rhythm of its own
development and with that of the capitalist
countries.
Socialism did not commit itself to
overcoming the capitalist system and the sys-
tem of wage labor, but instead became a so-
cial-economic alternative of capitalism.
Can we thus claim that the present
crisis of "real socialism" amounts to nothing
more than the crisis in the socialist manage-
ment of capital? That the present situation
has nothing to do with any ultimate crisis of
communism? We can indeed make such
claims if, having accepted the lessons of a
century and a half of history, we re-assert
with the greatest possible emphasis the dis-
tinction between socialism and communism.
For the first is nothing more than one of the
forms in which capital can be organized and
administered - and that is why most of the
advanced capitalist countries today have eco-
nomic systems in which the socialist compo-
166 FELIx GuArFARI & ToM NEGRI
nent is extremely strong. But communism is
the form in which society can be organized
after the destruction of both the capitalist sys-
tem, that is, after the destruction of the class
system and the system of exploitation, when
the organizing role of the state, as opposed
to that of society, has been cancelled. We
must further insist that it is absolutely untrue
that socialism is a phase of, or an instrument
of transition toward, communism. Historically
speaking, the exact contrary has been true,
for the most ferocious forms of political and
economic oppression have occurred within
"real socialism," whose so-called "new so-
cialist man" was nothing other than a per-
fected form of the beast of burden. As Marx
teaches us, communism is born directly from
class antagonism, from the refusal of both
work and the organization of work, whether
in the bourgeois form or the socialist form.
The new modes of this antagonism and this
refusal can be seen in Western Europe, but
are even more apparent today in the East
bloc's crisis of "real socialism." That is why
the revolt in the eastern European nations
constitutes a strong incentive for a renewed
discussion and a renewed militancy within
COMMUNISTS LIKE Us 167
communism. The need to distinguish between
"socialism" and "communism" has once
again become obvious: but this time not be-
cause of the blurred boundaries between
them, but because they are so opposed. So-
cialism is nothing other than one of the forms
taken by capitalist management of the econ-
omy and of power, whereas communism is
an absolutely radical political economic de-
mocracy and an aspiration to freedom.
What do the events in Eastern Eu-
rope reveal to us? First ofall - and we have
already recognized this - they mark the end
of the illusion that there might be shortcuts
to communism. Whatever might have been
the beliefs of our predecessors, whether work-
ers by profession or intellectuals in the van-
guard, we must acknowledge that there can
be no progress, no transition from capitalism
to communism via socialism. Communism,
thus, is the minimum essential program. It
can and must be constructed starting from
the conditions of socialist and/or capitalist
society - within these conditions. There are
not two or three or four or n phases or stages
of development: there is only one, and that
168 FEUx GUATFARI & Tom NEGRI
is the re-taking of freedom into one's own
hands and the construction of collective
means for controlling cooperation in produc-
tion. This single stage of developmental-
lows us to discover to what extent capitalism
and/or socialism have rendered production
social, abstract and shared, and it also per-
mits us to reorganize this cooperation out-
side and against the capitalist system of com-
mand, outside and against the daily theft of
power and wealth which is perpetrated by
the few at the expense of the whole society.
Communism is already alive within
the capitalist and/or socialist societies of to-
day, in the form of a secret order dedicated
to cooperation in production: an order cov-
ered up by the capitalist system of command
and/or bureaucracy, crushed between the
opposing forces of those who command and
those who follow commands, a new order
which strains to become manifest but can-
not. In the East bloc we saw mass protest
explode in the form of a pure negation of the
past.
But we also saw the expression of a
potential that was unknown to us in the West:
in the Eastern European nations we saw a
CowvIuusTs LuE Us 169
fully alive civil society come to the surface,
one that had not been homogenized, one ca-
pable of expressing a collective political will
in a way no longer found in the West - a
drive for power founded on the social base
rather than on the forms of the state. I am
certain that in the West as well all of this
will take place, and quite soon - for what
has happened in the East was not born from
the special experience of those countries.
What took place in the East is the
beginning of a revolt against a capitalism
which had reached the apex of its tyranny.
There are always those imbeciles who iden-
tify capitalist development with the number
of computers sold: of course in that case one
would have to believe that there was no capi-
talism in the East and that its revolution will
quickly be calmed by selling computers. And
there are those who will attempt this strat-
egy. But that is not really how things stand:
the level of capitalist development is defined
by the degree of social cooperation in pro-
duction. From this point of view, the Eastern
bloc is in no way behind the West.
It is against this background that we
read the revolution which has exploded; and
170 FEux GUATrARI & ToM NEGRI
we further suggest that, as with all revolu-
tions that are truly such, this one will spread
- from the East to the West, a new '68,
moving in the opposite direction.
What else do the events in the East
reveal? Another element, less visible to the
majority of the public, but nonetheless ex-
traodinarily important: the birth of a new
model of democracy. In our civilization we
are accustomed to thinking that there is only
one model of democracy, the Western one,
and that it need only be applied generally.
History has come to an end, there is
nothing more to invent, and Western democ-
racy and the "American way of life" repre-
sent the absolutely final product of the hu-
man spirit! All of this is Warrogant illusion.
What has happened in the East demonstrates
just the opposite, for (despite what Hegel
says) not only has the world Spirit not fin-
ished its travels, but in fact it gives signs of
having reversed its course, returning from
across the Atlantic and heading east, toward
the Russian steppes. That is where it has been
reborn, and that is where the debate about
democracy is taking place. Democracy can-
not be simply political emancipation, but
CoiwiNis1's LIKE Us 17
must include social and economic liberation.
No democracy is possible unless the prob-
lems of work and of command are solved.
Every form of democratic government must
also be a form of liberation from the slavery
of work, must yield a new, free organization
of cooperation in production. It is not a ques-
tion of putting factories and the organization
of social work in the hands of new bosses,
entrusting them to the hypocritical freedom
of the marketplace, handing them back to
the exploitative desires of capitalists and bu-
reaucrats. Rather, it is a question of under-
standing what might be the rules for the
democratic management of economic en-
trepreneurship. An impossible utopia? Fewer
and fewer people think so. Not only in the
East but even in the West, more and more
people are asking themselves how to achieve
a democracy that includes -the democratic
management of production. And their stupe-
faction is directed not at communism, but at
the present form of production - their
amaiement (and their grief) derive from the
fact that every day we are compelled to wit-
ness the persistence of figures as obsolete
and useless as the capitalist and bureaucratic
172 FELix GUATFARI & To NEGRI
bosses. In the East, within the revolution,
people are experiencing a new form of de-
mocracy: the democracy of work, a commu-
nist democracy.
A third lesson has reached us from
the East bloc. Who has revolted? The work-
ing class? In part yes, but often not. The
middle classes, then? To a fair degree, but
only when they were not linked to the bu-
reaucracy. What about the students, scien-
tists, workers linked to advanced technolo-
gies, intellectuals, and in short, all those who
deal with abstract and intellectual work? Cer-
tainly this represents the nucleus of the re-
bellion. Those who rebelled, in brief, were
the new kind of producers. A social producer,
manager of his own means of production and
capable of supplying both work and intellec-
tual planning, both innovative activity and a
cooperative socialization. From this point of
view as well, what has happened in the East
is not foreign to us: indeed we might say,
"de te fabula narratur." For in the countries
where capitalism reigns idiotic and trium-
phant, corrupt and incapable of self-criticism,
arrogant and confused, here as well the sub-
ject who constantly proposes to revolt is the
CoMMuNIsTs
same: the new productive subject, intellec-
tual and abstract, students, scientists, work-
ers linked to advanced technologies, univer-
sity workers, etc. It is because of this subject
with whom we identify that the events of the
East pertain to us. Whether Gorbachev re-
mains in power or is removed by Ligachev,
whether perestroika succeeds in the present
form or in a second wave that will inevitably
follow, whether the Russian empire endures
or not - these are all problems that concern
only the Soviets.
We have our Cossacks to defeat, and
there are many of them, and we are very late
in joining the battle. Nonetheless we are
grateful to the Soviets for having initiated,
for the second time in this century, a pro-
found process in the renewal of the spirit. It
is a process that we believe to be irrevers-
ible, not only in Russia, but also in the life
of humankind.
Toni Negri, Pans
Christmas 1989
Translated by Jared Becker
 Translator's Notes

1. Since the '60s in French philosophy, the

dialectic has come to be associated with
the imposition of power and the neutrali-
zation of radical, alternative energies. The
mediation of conflicting opposites and
their resolution into a higher order of
unity now is linked with a politics that
neutralizes conflict in the name of Party
or State order.

2. Both Guattari and Negri have studied Spi-

noza, the first modern materialist philoso-
pher. The term "potential" refers to the
creative possibility inherent in material
reality.

3. A term from the French Revolution for

"putschist" or leninist style revolutionary
movements which attempt to seize power
using a small conspiratorial band rather
176 FELiX GUA'rFARI & ToM NEORI

than relying on self-initiated mass mobi-

lization, democratic processes, or self-
government by the people.

4. Guaranteed workers are subsidized with

unemployment insurance by the state.
Non-guaranteed workers are more mar-
ginal and are not covered by insurance.

5. A term from French psychoanalysis which

refers to the system of self-delusion that
is inherent in the ego. It has come to
have the broader more sociological mean-
ing of the shared delusions of social
groups.

6. This refers to the leninist idea that the

economic aspirations of the proletariat
need to be "translated" into political form
by a vanguard party.